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Public justification beyond legitimacy

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Public justification beyond legitimacy

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Content Copyright 2022 Sean Crain Donahue PUBLIC JUSTIFICATION BEYOND LEGITIMACY by Sean Crain Donahue A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (PHILOSOPHY) August 2022 ii Acknowledgements In writing this dissertation, I have gratefully benefitted from support, encouragement, and inspiration that was selflessly provided by numerous people. There is never a principled stopping point in giving descriptions of such influence, but the following individuals all bear some responsibility for this dissertation being what it is. I’d like to first of all thank my dissertation advisor Jonathan Quong, who spent a more than generous amount of time helping me develop my ideas and writing, in addition to providing practical advice and a sensible outlook as needed along the way. Second, I’d like to thank Mark Schroeder for constant mentorship through the graduate program as well as patient and insightful feedback on almost all my work as it developed. Third, I thank John Hawthorne not only for feedback on my writing, but also for the formative advice to begin researching normative issues that set me on the path to writing about public justification. I’m furthermore grateful to Mark and John for encouraging me to ‘do something new’ when I was beginning to search for a dissertation topic and believing that I would be up to the task. I’m also thankful for plentiful feedback from my other dissertation committee members Stephen Finlay and Scott Altman. David Wallace deserves similar thanks for the feedback he gave as a proto-dissertation committee member. Next, numerous people I was fortunate to interact with at the University of Southern California, the Australian National University, and the 2019 Future of Public Reason Workshop at the University of Arizona deserve thanks. Janet Levin read an early draft of what became Chapter 3 of the dissertation, and Paul Garofalo read a draft of Chapter 4. I’ve also benefitted from iii interactions with Jacob Soll, Matthew Lindauer, Renée Jorgensen, Nicholas Southwood, Robert E. Goodin, Kevin Vallier, and Porter Williams. A former teacher, Joseph Macfarland, and my partner, Diana Caban Velez, also are responsible for inspiring examples and approaches that appeared in Chapters 1 and 4. I also could not have written this dissertation without some form of emotional support by way of love, friendship, and kindness from various people. This includes Diana Caban Velez, my parents Linus and Sharon Donahue, Mahmoud Jalloh, Alex Dietz, Andrew Stewart, Kenneth Silver, Nicola Kemp, Dan Pallies, Frank Hong, Eleonore Neufeld, Junhyo Lee, Douglas Wadle, Jonathan Wright, Jennifer Foster, Nicholas Laskowski, Rima Basu, Gary Van Hartog, teachers Thomas Kissick, Gail Rackley, Kathleen Antonazzo, Florian Steinberger, Stephan Hartmann, and John White (who all gave me formative instruction in how to write and think), and Painter Bob, who taught me much about human nature. Lastly, I’d like to thank the secretarial support staff whose dedicated work during the bulk of my time at USC enabled everything to go smoothly. This includes Natalie Schaad, J.N. Nikolai, Amanda Velasco, Michele Root, Barrington Smith, Cynthia Lugo, and Karla Rivera. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements..........................................................................................................................ii Abstract ............................................................................................................................................v Introduction: The Rat-King and The Realm of Reason .................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Public Justification and the Veil of Testimony ............................................................ 16 1. The Case of Transparencia .................................................................................................................................. 17 2.1. The Limited Resources Argument, Part1.......................................................................................................... 23 2.2. Interlude ........................................................................................................................................................... 25 2.3. The Limited Resources Argument, Part 2 ......................................................................................................... 28 3. An Explanation Based on Trust............................................................................................................................ 30 4. Extent of Dependence. ........................................................................................................................................ 35 5. Consequences and Prospects. ............................................................................................................................. 37 6. Conclusion. .......................................................................................................................................................... 42 Chapter 2: Powerful Deceivers and Public Reason Liberalism: An Argument for Externalization44 1. Why Public Reason Liberals Reject Externalism .................................................................................................. 47 2. The Conceptual Challenge of Powerful Deceivers .............................................................................................. 52 3. The Real Challenge of Powerful Deceivers .......................................................................................................... 57 4. Externalizing Public Reason Liberalism ............................................................................................................... 62 5. Objections and Replies ........................................................................................................................................ 69 6. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................................... 74 Chapter 3: A Defense of Blame from the Blue.............................................................................. 75 1. Preparatory Comments ....................................................................................................................................... 77 2. The Appeal of Excluding Blame from the Blue .................................................................................................... 80 3. The Basic Problem ............................................................................................................................................... 83 4. Responses to the Basic Problem ......................................................................................................................... 89 5. Community .......................................................................................................................................................... 96 6. Objections and Replies ...................................................................................................................................... 101 7. Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................................... 107 Chapter 4: The Dark Knowledge Problem: Why Public Justifications are not Arguments ......... 108 1. The Standard Conception of Public Justification ............................................................................................... 112 2. Dark Knowledge ................................................................................................................................................ 118 3. The Dark Knowledge Problem ........................................................................................................................... 123 4. Civic Vice and Dark Knowledge ......................................................................................................................... 129 5. Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................................... 136 A Coda About the Ideal of Public Justification ............................................................................ 137 References .................................................................................................................................. 140 v Abstract This dissertation investigates the epistemic conditions that must be satisfied for us to properly live together under the legal and moral rules that structure our societies. According to the philosophical tradition of Public Reason Liberalism, such rules are legitimate only if they are justifiable to the diverse perspectives found among all reasonable people. This dissertation investigates how this so-called Public Justification Principle can be true given that our beliefs often depend on testimony. I argue that the ideal of public justification expressed by this principle is compatible with depending on testimony only if we revise our conception of public justification to include epistemically externalist conditions. These revisions are encapsulated in two major changes. First, public reason liberals must view public justification as depending on both internal and external conditions. According to this hybrid view, not only whether the common rules appear good matters for whether they are publicly justified. Facts about what caused this appearance matter too, even if these facts are epistemically external in the sense that many people cannot be aware of them. Second, public justification must no longer be considered a necessary condition for legitimacy. Whether a law is legitimate instead depends on whether it is justifiable to all people who are internally and externally reasonable, where externally reasonable people lack beliefs that have been inappropriately caused by deception and manipulation. Articulating this externalized model of the ideal of public justification promises new insights into the importance of the civic virtue of testifiers and why spreading political information is morally wrong. 1 Introduction: The Rat-King and The Realm of Reason This is a work of political philosophy that is realistically utopian. 1 It is utopian in that it addresses not only the question ‘How ought we live together?’ but also the question ‘What are the best conditions under which we can hope to live together?’ It is realistic in that it seeks answers to these questions that are limited by what beings like us can achieve within political structures like ours – namely, constitutional democracies near the beginning of the 21 st century. I mean the term ‘democracy’ here in a descriptive sense. It is a form of government in which the public has some influence over how the state’s coercive force is expended, whether by directly creating legislation or merely choosing others to perform this task. 2 The assumption of realism thereby does not presuppose any optimism in our answers to the above questions. The best conditions under which we can hope to live together may be wonderful; they may also be horrific. This work is partly about how far we should expect things to go in either direction. At one extreme is what we may call Cynical Realism. According to this view, life in a constitutional democracy always has been and always will be little more than a ceaseless conflict for dominance among individual interests. Politics on this view is like life in a rat-king, a composite being that forms when many rats accidently knot their tails together and get violently dragged around by the common will. 3 Like such rats, we find ourselves tied up in political associations we can hardly leave by choice. We fear others will use the levers of power to drag us in a direction we do not want, if not eliminate us entirely. We are often anxious to get there first and be the 1 Rawls (2001: 4). 2 Held (1987: 3). 3 Rat-kings are merely rumored to exist. See Reilly (2017) for a history of purported occurrences. 2 ones to do the dragging instead. A fair amount of the time, no one seems to move anywhere in particular. Perhaps in the end we must admit that the cynical realist is correct that this is the best kind of political life we should hope for. However, we clearly ought to avoid a rat-king existence to the greatest extent we can. But how far from this state can we realistically get? And what, if anything, could get us there? These questions are important to ask because being too much of a cynical realist can cause us to give up striving for opportunities we could otherwise reach. After all, people once thought that the political achievements we often reflexively pride ourselves on like gay marriage rights, universal suffrage, the end of child labor, and the abolition of slavery were completely unrealistic to hope for. In responding to these questions, many people might be quick to point out that we are not rats but rather rational beings, and rational beings can reason. That is to say: We can form ideas about how the world is. We can form ideas about how the world ought to be. We can form plans and projects that test our ideas against the world and that make the world conform to them. And we can communicate our ideas, plans, and projects through speech to other rational beings and persuade them to cooperate with us. Perhaps this makes us different in kind from creatures like rats, perhaps it does not – this old debate is irrelevant for our purposes. 4 Our immediate concern is what reason can do to remove us from the rat-king. On one conceivable view: almost everything. Opposite Cynical Realism lies what we may call Starry-Eyed Rationalism. All rational beings are equal in possessing the capacity for reason. The starry-eyed rationalist holds out the hope that there is some Great Idea about how we ought 4 van Inwagen (2009: 171). 3 to live together that all rational beings can recognize as true and so be motivated to comply with in virtue of possessing this capacity. Furthermore, this idea is rich enough to guide all rational beings on how to cooperate in order to avoid major conflicts and tensions. Because the Great Idea has these great features, at least some rational beings should commit themselves to the task of finding this idea and adequately communicating it to others. Doing so would enable us to trade life in a rat-king for life in a Realm of Reason, a political organization where everyone lives in harmony through the guidance and persuasive power of the Great Idea. As strange as this view may sound, something like it is reflected in the theories writers have occasionally proposed, especially within the rationalist tradition of political philosophy stretching back at least as far as Plato. John Rawls, for instance, in his 1971 A Theory of Justice, argued that rational beings can cognize an “original position” from which they would agree on a set of principles to justly organize their political structures based on a set of facts about the world they find themselves in. 5 These so-called principles of justice would then function to regulate a “well-ordered society”. 6 A well-ordered society is stable over time in virtue of its citizens’ public knowledge of the principles of justice and their motivation to comply with and reproduce their acceptance over time. 7 Whatever the merits of the view Rawls proposes in A Theory of Justice may be, Starry- Eyed Rationalism is at least for its part too unrealistic and therefore utopian in a bad way. This is because every society contains some measure of people who are unreasonable. Unreasonable people are basically those you wouldn’t tolerate sharing a political life with if you could help it. 5 Rawls (1999: 120). 6 (Ibid.: 232). 7 (ibid. 398). 4 One way to be unreasonable is to be irrational. But unreasonable people can also be rational in the sense that they can think logically, perform means-end calculations to satisfy their desires, update their beliefs to conform to new evidence, and perform many other sophisticated mental tasks but who are nevertheless unwilling to sacrifice their own interests to benefit others. An unreasonable person may be unwilling to be taxed to fund any kind of social welfare program. An unreasonable person may be disposed to view sensible environmental regulations as worth violating when they get in the way of her own projects. An unreasonable person may be steadfastly hostile to extending the same opportunities to advance in life that she has enjoyed to people of races and economic classes different from her own. It’s an unfortunate fact that many people who are rational but unreasonable like this exist. It is consequently badly utopian to expect to find a Great Idea that could produce substantial agreement about how we ought to live together among all rational beings. There will always be some remainder of unreasonable people who cannot accept our ideas about how to organize political life in spite of being rational. We should consequently revise our hope for the best conditions under which we can live together downward to some extent toward Cynical Realism. As disappointing as this may be, perhaps we can still hope for things to be pretty good. Although our societies contain many people who are unreasonable, they also contain many other people who are reasonable. Reasonable people are basically those who we do not merely tolerate but to some extent welcome in sharing a political life, even if we may never be able to relate to them as personal friends. Reasonable people are willing to cooperate on fair terms provided others do likewise. Reasonable people are rational. A further important feature of reasonable people is that they might have mistaken views, but they care about the truth and 5 strive to form their beliefs as well as they can by the standards they accept. It’s a happy fact that many people who reasonable like this exist. So, perhaps we can still hope for a Great Idea that could produce substantial agreement about how we ought to live together at least among all people who are reasonable. Nevertheless, many philosophers worry that this political condition is also too much to hope for. There is one problem threatening this hope that is of central concern for the present work. It is a problem that John Rawls famously argued mitigates against the possibility of the kind of well-ordered society described in his own Theory of Justice. We’ll need some new vocabulary to appreciate the force of this problem. Let the circumstances of justice be the realistic conditions under which reasonable people must work together to formulate and adopt just principles that specify how the state ought to be structured and what laws of the government and norms of social morality ought to be in place. The first claim of this problem is that these circumstances surely include that the evidence bearing on which laws and political structures to accept is complex, that the concepts we use are always somewhat vague, that our judgments are shaped by our total experiences, and similar considerations. The second claim is that the political arrangements under which we ought to live together should be broadly liberal. That is to say, they should leave reasonable people largely free to form and pursue their own ideas about the good and make decisions about how they ought to live on their basis. Putting these claims together, we see that reasonable people facing the circumstances of justice that surely exist while living under broadly liberal political arrangements naturally come to adopt a plurality of conflicting views. This is evident from the diversity of our own societies, which includes groups such as Christians, Muslims, Atheists, Libertarians, and so forth. Many 6 members of these groups hold their views sincerely as a result of reasoning in good faith by their best lights and are willing to cooperate with each other on fair terms. The problem is that when some reasonable people wield democratic power solely on the basis of such views, there is a danger that they will impose on other reasonable people based on considerations that they cannot accept. This would happen if a Christian were to force Atheists to accept a ban on some means of contraception for religious reasons, or if Atheists forced Christians to accept a particular cosmological theory about the origin of the universe for Atheist reasons, and so forth. In short, the very kind of liberal conditions that we must require to escape the rat-king life threaten to lead us back into it. Perhaps one does not see this so-called problem of reasonable pluralism to be much of a problem. For instance, one might adopt the view called Comprehensive Perfectionism, according to which the state should not only be based on some comprehensive view of the good human life and good human thought but should also be permitted to wield its coercive power to significantly promote conformity to that comprehensive view and to dissuade non-conformity. 8 In short, the comprehensive perfectionist thinks the state should be permitted to further the true human good, even against the sincere objections of reasonable people. Comprehensive Perfectionism might sound plausible, but consider for a moment what it would mean in practice. Suppose we could significantly promote more people living a good life by spiking the tap water in all major cities with Oxytocin, a drug that promotes social 8 Quong (2011: 12-13). 7 cooperation. 9 It’s easy to imagine the responses the proposal to make this intervention would cause. Many religious groups would vehemently object to being forced to use drugs for non- medical purposes. Non-religious proponents of virtue ethics who highly value authentic moral action would say that it prevents them from pursuing a good life as they see it. Libertarians would object to this policy as overly paternalistic. And so forth. It’s not that people in these groups merely don’t like the idea of drugging the water. The problem is rather that this proposal lies beyond the limits of what they can accept on the basis of their reasonably held beliefs. Considering this situation evokes the basic intuition that even if the perspectives of people like these turn out to be incorrect, and even if we could overpower them in the legislative arena by rallying a majority coalition, we ought not institute the policy of drugging the water with Oxytocin against their objections. Comprehensive Perfectionism by contrast suggests that we can take such actions and cleanse our conscience by saying ‘Well, that’s politics’. In this way, Comprehensive Perfectionism may not be a cynical view, but it plausibly licenses a way of treating each other that is too close to the rat-king for comfort. Perhaps in the end we must admit that Comprehensive Perfection is correct and that occasionally fighting to impose what we think is good against other reasonable people like the ones just described is the best kind of political life we should hope for. Yet, as with Cynical Realism, it is worth investigating whether there is a better alternative. Many philosophers argue that there is: its name is Public Reason Liberalism. 9 This example is not wildly farfetched. Some writers have argued that we should take the prospect of pharmacological interventions for the purpose of moral enhancement seriously. See, for instance, Crutchfield (August 10, 2020). 8 Public Reason Liberalism – of which Rawls is often considered the originator – both takes the problem of reasonable pluralism seriously and claims it can be overcome. 10 Public reason liberals purport that this is possible through the central requirement of their theory, which is called the Public Justification Principle. This principle can be initially stated as follows: Public Justification Principle: The rules that structure our societies are legitimate only if they are justifiable to all reasonable people. Depending on the thinker, the rules in question extend at least to the laws and the basic structure of the state but also possibly to social moral norms. ‘Justifiable’ also no doubt requires clarification. It is among the chief aims of this work to investigate what sense of justification this principle can realistically presuppose, however, so this clarification will be delayed. Suffice it to say for now that public reason liberals claim that the Public Justification Principle addresses the problem of reasonable pluralism because it requires acting with a kind of transparency. For a rule to be publicly justified means that reasonable people can in some sense see sufficient reason to accept it. 11 Justifying rules to reasonable people by offering them considerations they can accept also respects them as free and equal in their rational capacity to make judgments. 12 A commitment to an ideal of public justification thereby conciliates reasonable people with the social order. It enables them to view the rules that govern their social and political lives as ones they could impose themselves and assures them that other reasonable 10 See Rawls (2005). Turner and Gaus (2017) show, however, that Public Reason Liberalism has a pedigree in the history of political philosophy going back to Hobbes. 11 See Nagel (1987: 232), Waldron (1987: 149), and Vallier (2020: 1112). 12 See Waldron (1987: 128), Gaus (2011: 17), Quong (2011: 2), and Vallier (2019: 9). 9 people will respect them by not seeking to impose demands that conflict with their perspectives. 13 While a society in which reasonable people restrain themselves by the Public Justification Principle may or may not be organized around some Great Idea, it would at least be free of the relations of domination among the reasonable that the cynical realist and comprehensive perfectionist must admit their views allow. A society ordered by an ideal of public justification is also free of the worst utopian excesses of Starry-Eyed Rationalism. The ideal of public justification requires us to live under and impose rules that are justifiable to all reasonable people as opposed to all rational people. So, perhaps we can at least hope to live in a society guided by the ideal of public justification. However, I think we need to be cautious about getting our hopes up. Although public justification allows Public Reason Liberalism to strike an attractive balance between realism and utopianism in light of the problem of reasonable pluralism, the view confronts a further problem that is just as significant. This is the fact well known among epistemologists that we often have to depend on testimony to form many of our beliefs, which naturally includes our beliefs about which rules to accept. Testimony conflicts with the kind of transparency standardly assumed to be required for public justification: If you depend on someone else’s testimony to accept a rule, then in a significant sense you can’t see reason from your own perspective to accept it. Depending on testimony also leaves you vulnerable to being manipulated and deceived by people who are unreasonable. Such people sometimes have powerful incentives and vast means to make rules look good even if they aren’t. Our pervasive dependence on testimony consequently 13 Lister (2013: 114-115). 10 threatens to render the ideal of public justification implausible and our hope of keeping a significant distance from the rat-king unwarranted. Fortunately, our situation needn’t get so bad. My overall thesis is that our pervasive dependence on testimony is compatible with upholding a plausible ideal of public justification. However, accommodating our dependence on testimony requires making substantial and far- reaching revisions to the Public Justification Principle in addition to how we think of public justification and other related notions. There are two major revisions that deserve particular emphasis. First, the sense of justification most relevant to public justification needs to be revised into a hybrid of both epistemically internal and epistemically external conditions. The epistemically internal conditions preserve Public Reason Liberalism’s commitment to the basic idea that reasonable people must be able to see reason to accept a rule because they require reasonable people to have sufficient reflectively accessible reason to accept it. When rules become acceptable to people on the basis of testimony, however, the reasons why the rule is imposed are often inadvertently or deliberately obscure from their perspectives. So, further conditions must be met for such rules to count as publicly justified. These conditions are epistemically external in the sense that whether they are satisfied is not reflectively accessible from the perspectives of those who depend on testimony. Second, the relation between public justification and the legitimacy of rules stated in the Public Justification Principle must be weakened. If a rule imposed by the government is illegitimate, then the government lacks the authority to use some degree of coercion to force 11 people to comply with it. 14 One result of our pervasive dependence on testimony is that unreasonable people can sometimes rationally deceive reasonable people into believing that otherwise good rules are unjustifiable. Sticking with the current formulation of the Public Justification Principle would thereby require us to admit that unreasonable people can easily make rules illegitimate. I argue that preventing this implausible result requires adding an epistemically externalist aspect to reasonableness. We should consider the legitimacy of rules to depend on their justifiability to people who are both internally and externally reasonable, where externally reasonable people lack beliefs that have been inappropriately caused by people who are unreasonable. Proponents of either of the major versions of Public Reason Liberalism currently on offer should accept these revisions. 15 I will describe these versions in more detail below as necessary. However, briefly characterizing them now will make them easier to spot. The first version is loosely organized around the work of John Rawls and tends to be associated with the rationalist tradition of political philosophy. 16 Rawlsians often favor using an ideal theory test to apply principles and to test philosophical claims. This test involves asking whether such principles and claims are feasible or true in an ideal political situation. For example, Rawlsians consider reasonable pluralism an important philosophical challenge because it would occur even when everyone was sincerely willing to fully comply with the demands of justice. 17 In the case of applying the Public Justification Principle, the ideal theory test involves considering a 14 Quong (2011: 108). 15 I believe these revisions should also be accepted by proponents of so-called Political Perfectionism because they also endorse a public justification test – see, for example, Tahzib (2019: 171-172) – but such views are so new that they need to be articulated further before I can claim this with more certainty. 16 Frazer (2007). 17 See Rawls (2005: 55) and Quong (2011: 143-144). 12 rule justifiable if and only if it could be justified to reasonable people were they sincerely willing to fully comply with the demands of justice and reasoning under conditions favorable to reflection. The second version of Public Reason Liberalism is loosely organized around the work of Gerald Gaus and tends to be associated with the sentimentalist tradition of political philosophy originating in Hobbes and Hume. 18 Gausians consider a public justification requirement to be ultimately based on the conditions under which persons become blameworthy for violating moral norms and so are the fitting recipients of anger and resentment from their peers. This moral scenario supposedly shows that political rules require public justification because the state’s responding with coercion to law violations is analogous to responding to norm violations with anger and resentment. Gausians are less favorably disposed to ideal theory than Rawlsians and instead apply principles and test philosophical claims in contexts where people have been at most moderately idealized. This involves considering what people can easily accept by reasoning from the current commitments and information available to their perspectives. 19 I will spend four chapters making the case that these proponents of Public Reason Liberalism must revise their conceptions of public justification. The first chapter uses an ideal theory test to show that our pervasive dependence on testimony is in principle compatible with public justification and to defend the hybrid view described above. The background strategy of this chapter is to describe a couple kinds of reasonable people we can expect to populate our societies that I call busy citizens and inquisitive citizens and then to show that publicly justifying 18 Gaus (1990: xiii) – value and justification. 19 Vallier (2020: 1109-1110). 13 laws to these people would be impossible unless the relevant sense of justification had an epistemically externalist condition. Another point this chapter makes is that public justification must often come about through reasonable people placing their trust in the testifiers they depend on to accept laws. The second chapter then explores a way this trust can be betrayed by considering another kind of agent we should realistically expect to exist in our societies: the powerful deceiver. Powerful deceivers are unreasonable people who trick reasonable people into rationally considering otherwise good laws unjustified, thereby causing a failure of at least the internalist condition for public justification. It’s in this chapter that I argue for making the second batch of revisions already described. The problem that powerful deceivers creates also provides additional reason to adopt the hybrid view of public justification that should be difficult for Gaussians in particular to deny on account of their preference for avoiding ideal theory tests. A main outcome of this chapter is to show that proponents of both versions of Public Reason Liberalism must agree that instances of powerful deception require laws to be forced on some reasonable people who disagree with them. Gausians are prone to find this conclusion especially repugnant given the strong connection they see between political coercion and the reactive attitudes that are the fitting response to blameworthiness. The third chapter charitably undermines this criticism. I argue that people can sometimes be blameworthy for performing actions they cannot see reason to avoid. Since Gausians are incorrect that people have to see reason to avoid an act in order to become blameworthy for performing that act, they are wrong that political coercion is likewise appropriately applied only for what people can see reason to avoid. The reactive attitudes do not 14 form an appropriate basis for our judgements about when using the coercive force of the state is legitimate. In the fourth chapter, I return to emphasizing the Rawlsian perspective by using the ideal theory test to investigate the externalist condition of public justification (though, as in the first chapter, I use this test in a way that Gausians are also obliged to accept). One possible way of formulating this condition is that it requires testifiers to rely on reasons that the listeners they address with their justifications would accept were they aware of them, even though these listeners may never be able to gain this awareness. I expect this to be the kind of externalist condition that Public Reasons Liberals would formulate. This is because Rawlsians and Gausians alike have assumed public justifications must be representable as arguments that appeal to premises that the people to whom they are addressed would accept. I develop what I call the Dark Knowledge Problem to show that this view is mistaken. Public justifications are not necessarily representable as arguments. I propose an alternative view according to which the epistemically externalist condition of public justification instead consists in the civic virtue of testifiers and in particular whether the testifiers that reasonable people depend on for justifications are adequately free of civic vice. To close, I present a Coda that suggest what we should think about the ideal of public justification in light of these four chapters. This ideal is shown to consist in three progressively better justificatory situations, any one of which is realistically achievable to some extent in a political condition like ours. A society guided by the ideal of public justification accordingly turns out to be an attractive and realistic alternative to the rat-king life. A potential cost of these revisions from the perspective of public reason liberals is that public justification is not required 15 for political legitimacy in any of these ideals. Nevertheless, in the process of articulating these ideals, we will come to see that public justification has an important role to play in our political lives beyond serving as a condition for legitimacy. 16 Chapter 1: Public Justification and the Veil of Testimony Our first step toward the conclusions just reviewed is to focus more closely on the ideal of perspectival conciliation that public justification is supposed to achieve. 20 It’s in particular worth emphasizing how philosophers have characterized this ideal. Its spirit is captured by Jeremy Waldron in the claim that “the social order should in principle be capable of explaining itself at the tribunal of each person’s understanding.” 21 But how does public justification bring about perspectival conciliation? I’ll be arguing in this chapter that testimony plays a larger role here than has been acknowledged. It is no surprise that public justification and testimony are closely related. After all, justifications typically involve exchanging statements. Yet I claim more than this. In many cases, it is not possible to satisfy the Public Justification Principle without some persons having to depend on testimony from others. This claim ought to be surprising because satisfying the Public Justification Principle requires all persons to be respected as free and equal. If some persons cannot accept the social order without depending on someone else’s testimony, then they seemingly have failed to be respected in the relevant sense, and the social order seemingly has failed to explain itself at the tribunal of their understanding. These concerns are misplaced. If it can be shown that making persons dependent on testimony in appropriate circumstances suffices to satisfy the Public Justification Principle, this 20 Perspectival conciliation is presupposed in the aim of the philosophical theory known as political liberalism to explain how coercive institutions ought to exist under conditions of reasonable pluralism. See, for instance, Rawls 2005, pp. 133-134 and 2001, p. 3; Freeman 2007, p. 8; Quong 2011, pp. 138-144; and Vallier 2019, p. 6. The relevance of my considerations is not restricted to this tradition of theory, since its critics also acknowledge the importance of perspectival conciliation, often under the guise of ‘non-subjugation’. See, for instance, Enoch 2015, pp. 114-116, 138 and Wendt 2019, p. 45, fn. 21. 21 Waldron 1987, p. 149. 17 would establish that public justification is compatible with such dependence. Plausible empirical observations could then support the claim that dependence on testimony is in many cases necessary for public justification. This, at any rate, is how I establish my dissertation’s main claim. 1. The Case of Transparencia We can establish the sufficiency claim by using a Rawlsian ideal theory test, which we can now describe in more detail. The test involves asking whether a normative requirement would be feasible in an ideal political state. The by an ‘ideal state’, I mean a situation in which all persons have realistic reasoning powers, restrictions on their time, and dispositions to form reasonable disagreements but always conform to their epistemic and moral obligations as they reasonably see them. If a normative requirement would be infeasible even in such a realistic but ideal context, then it should be rejected. This testing strategy is defensible because any requirements for public justification that are too demanding in such a context are too demanding in our own. In this way, the ideal theory test also places constraints on Gaussian versions of Public Reason Liberalism because this family of theories aims to develop requirements by considering what can be properly expected of people in non-ideal contexts. To this end, consider the following case. Transparencia is an island nation that has no history of political corruption. Its government informs everyone about what laws are created by sending emails that everyone is expected to read. These emails state not only the content of the laws but also contain side commentary describing the penalty for breaking them, the conditions under which they apply, and some justification for their creation. 18 W is one such law. It says that drinking from plastic water bottles within 10 meters of any natural body of water is illegal. The side commentary about W states that the penalty for breaking it is a 1,000 dollar fine. It contains descriptions of the law’s key terms that suffice to prevent citizens from accidently breaking it. However, the only justification explicitly given for W is equivalent to the statement ‘W is a good law.’ Before receiving this email, nothing spoke for or against W for any citizen. The politicians involved in writing the law and email are nevertheless credible testifiers. They have an excellent testimonial track record in that the vast majority of their past assertions have been dependable and they have never lied. Furthermore, they are committed to making laws only for reasons that all persons can be reasonably expected to accept. W is no exception. It is supported by such reasons, it’s just that citizens have no direct access to them. The only reflectively accessible reasons for them to accept W are given by the email’s content and the credibility of the legislators. Lastly, all Transparencia citizens are committed to accepting propositions that are asserted by credible testifiers in the absence of defeating evidence. If the citizens didn’t share this commitment or one functionally equivalent to it, all of them would not properly gain beliefs though testimony. Since testimony is an indispensable source of a vast number of anyone’s beliefs, all of them ought to have such a commitment. Is W publicly justified in Transparencia? On the one hand, it seems so. A standard way to become justified in accepting a proposition is to receive credible testimony supporting it. 22 Everyone in 22 Accepting a law, for our purposes, consists in accepting the proposition that the law ought to be obeyed. To accept a proposition here means to treat it as true for epistemic and moral reasons. Belief in the propositions that justify accepting a law is not required because belief denotes a positive attitude, whereas public justification is 19 Transparencia has received credible testimony that W is a good law. This testimony has also been given sincerely by persons committed to making laws that everyone could accept. On this basis, it would be hard to deny that everyone in Transparencia has sufficient epistemic and moral reason to accept that W is a good law. Consequently, everyone in Transparencia is justified in accepting W. On the other hand, I anticipate that many Public Reason Liberals will suspect that even if everyone in Transparence is justified in some sense in accepting W, W is nevertheless not publicly justified. I claim that this suspicion is incorrect. The government’s testimony suffices for W’s public justification either in this case or one very similar to it. A preliminary difficulty for establishing this claim is that ‘W is a good law’ is moral testimony. Philosophers note that something seems wrong about becoming vegan 23 or taking a stand against a war 24 merely because someone tells you to. Perhaps something is similarly wrong with accepting W merely because the government says that it is a good law. Nevertheless, the reasons typically motivating concern about moral testimony do not apply to Transparencia. What some find objectionable is not all moral testimony but rather the claim that we can know or justifiably believe moral claims on its basis. 25 Accepting that p does not require knowing or believing that p. So, one can hold that being justified in accepting W on compatible with some persons taking a neutral attitude like indifference towards the propositions that justify the law. There is nevertheless a connection between belief and acceptance. Belief that p entails acceptance that p, but not the converse. Acceptance that p is also incompatible with disbelief that p. For a comparison to another view of acceptance, see Bratman 1992, p. 9. For a helpful illustration of the contrast between treating a proposition as true and acting as if a proposition is true, see Ross and Schroeder 2014, pp. 264-268. 23 Hills 2009, p. 94. 24 Mogensen 2017, p. 261. 25 See, for instance, Nickel 2001, p. 253; Driver 2006, p. 624; Hopkins 2007, p. 612-613; Hills 2009, p. 94-95; and McGrath 2011, p. 113. 20 the basis of moral testimony is possible without rejecting this claim. I also grant that acts performed on the basis of moral testimony fall short of perfect virtue. 26 However, it would be an overly severe restriction if laws were not publicly justified unless everyone could conform to them as a perfectly virtuous act. Lastly, opponents of moral testimony typically focus on cases that are either controversial or objects of strong social consensus. 27 But W is by stipulation not controversial and is a law that citizens are antecedently neutral about. For these reasons, the moral testimony literature is largely irrelevant to our considerations. 28 The most substantial difficulty for establishing the sufficiency claim is the fact that philosophers disagree about which conception of ‘justification’ is relevant to public justification. These conceptions can be classified according to what I call requirements of coherence and requirements of connectivity. Requirements of coherence specify how a person’s perspective must cohere with the law or the perspective others take on the law for it to be publicly justified. All views of public justification require, as a minimal standard of coherence, that persons have sufficient internal reason to accept the law, where by ‘internal reasons’ I mean those that are reflectively accessible from peoples’ perspectives. Other views additionally require that persons be able to defend or explain their acceptance of the law. 29 Requirements of connectivity specify the character of the reasons a person must have to accept the law for it to be publicly justified. As mentioned, views of public justification require 26 Nickel 2001, p. 257. 27 Sliwa 2012, pp. 184-188. 28 van Wietmarschen 2019 has recently argued that citizens’ votes in a democracy ought not be directed by testimony, although they are permissibly informed by it. My claims are also compatible with this view. That testimony can justify laws once they are created does not entail that it permissibly directs their creation, whether through referendum or otherwise. 29 Rawls 1997, pp. 768-769. 21 that the reasons persons have to accept the law are consistent with respecting those persons as free and equal. 30 Reasons given by threats, demands, or appeals to authority are incompatible with this standard. Other views additionally require that persons’ acceptance of a law must possibly be the outcome of a sufficient exercise of their epistemic autonomy or that persons can understand why the law is worth imposing. An initial examination shows that dependence on testimony is compatible with satisfying requirements of coherence and connectivity. Consider requirements of coherence. Transparencia citizens obviously have sufficient reason to accept W relative to their various perspectives. They can also justify accepting W to others simply by repeating what the government has said. They can defend W against criticism. If a dissenting citizen says that he read in the Weekly Enquirer (a local tabloid) that W is not a good law, for instance, another citizen can respond by using whatever she knows about the quality of the tabloid to defeat the objection. Next, consider requirements of connectivity. The Transparencia citizens have been respected as free and equal. The government’s testimony is sincere, and W has been made for reasons that all can be reasonably expected to accept. The government also did not talk over its citizens’ heads, such as by giving testimony full of technical details that it would be unreasonable to expect them to understand. 31 One might object that the Transparencia government has made an appeal to authority. This is also not the case. The government has said, ‘W is a good law.’ The government did not say, ‘You ought to accept W because we say so’. These assertions are distinct. 30 For concise statements of this moral aspect of public justification, see Gaus 2010, pp. 186-187 and Larmore 2015, p. 78. 31 One might object that the government has talked down to the citizens because it has released insufficient details about the law. I address this objection below. 22 The former is undermined by evidence that W is not in fact a good law. The latter is undermined by evidence that the government does not have the power to create obligations merely by giving commands. The former assertion provides reason for the citizens to obey the law irrespective of whether the government has this power. It leaves citizens free to conclude that W ought to be accepted themselves. Of course, one might say that an appeal to authority is being made in that the citizens must take it on the government’s authority that W is a good law. Feasibly avoiding an appeal to authority in this sense requires providing a more robust testimonial content, one that gives citizens further reason to accept that W is good or to understand why W is good. Or, if one is a Rawlsian, one might think that W must be justified to the citizens by appeal to a reasonable balance of public political values and epistemic standards. 32 We can address this concern by slightly changing the example. Suppose the government instead asserted, ‘W is a good law because computer models show it will improve environmental health’. Environmental health and being supported by computer models refer to a public political value and epistemic standard. Transparencia citizens can then understand to a greater extent why W ought to be accepted. As before, they can explain and justify why W is good to others as well as defend its acceptance by simply repeating this more robust content. Something resembling this statement, at any rate, strikes me as the most that many of us can say to defend and explain many of the laws that we accept. 32 Quong 2011, p. 219. 23 2.1. The Limited Resources Argument, Part1 One might nevertheless find my defense inadequate. First, one might object that satisfying requirements of coherence requires that persons are able to gain a richer understanding of the law or a greater discursive ability to defend and explain it than is possible through hearing one or two sentences. Second, one might object that requirements of connectivity are not satisfied simply because the Transparencia citizens depend on the government’s testimony to accept W. This objection is tantamount to a rejection of the possibility of testimony contributing to public justification whenever the propositions accepted via testimony cannot be accepted by non- testimonial means. Let us call the views corresponding to these two objections high-standard views. Such views are frequently expressed. Some claim that public justification requires symmetric justificatory support relations between those who impose a law and those who accept it. Charles Larmore, for instance, says that the principle by which we coerce others ought to “depend on their reason just as we believe it draws upon our own.” 33 Others claim that public justification requires shared access to the grounds of a justification. Thomas Nagel says that when you coerce someone, it must be the case that “they have what you have, and can arrive at a judgment on the same basis.” 34 Abner Greene similarly tells us that the evidential basis for laws must not be like the contents of a “secret-box” that only few can look inside. 35 The view expressed by Waldron’s quote arguably belongs in this family. 36 33 Larmore 2008, p. 149. 34 Nagel 1987, p. 232. 35 Greene 1994, p. 659. 36 Christopher Bertram, in discussing the consequences of theoretical complexity for the ideal of democratic community, presupposes that a high-standard view is constitutive of this ideal. (1997, pp. 571, 574-575) Bertram 24 Nevertheless, all high-standard views share a common problem: each is too demanding. We can see this by recognizing a few assumptions we must make about the realistic but ideal state we use in our ideal theory test if this state is to be adequately realistic. First, we ought to assume that many persons living in the ideal state want to pursue the goods of family, friendships, meaningful work (which for many will not be in politics), and at least one hobby. Pursuing such goods is not the only way of life, but it is among those that deserve protection. One point of the state is to make such a life possible for those who want to pursue it. We should therefore secondly assume that any political theory requiring too much interference with the pursuit of these goods is a non-starter. And finally, we have already assumed that the persons in the ideal state have realistic powers of reason and practical demands on their time. A consequence of this third assumption is that with respect to a given standard of justification each person has a finite justificatory capacity, which is the maximum number of laws that can be justified for that person according to that standard without interfering too much with her pursuit of these goods. Given these three assumptions, each high-standard view leads to what I call the busy citizens problem. They all make achieving perspectival conciliation through public justification require many citizens to exceed their justificatory capacity. This is plausible just given the sheer number of kinds of laws that we can expect a concerned citizen to care about. These include – but are not limited to – firearm regulation, recreational drug use, marriage, reproductive health, claims that if one is committed to this ideal, then one must accept a burdensome constraint on the complexity of admissible political justifications. (1997: 575) I argue in this section that this democratic ideal is too demanding and in Section5 that reliance on complex scientific claims in crafting legislation is often practically necessary. The hybrid view of public justification that I ultimately present in this article suggests a way that one can accept a version of this ideal without incurring a burdensome complexity constraint. I consider Bertram’s claim to be problematic only for those who are committed to an ideal of democratic community that is unrealistic to begin with. 25 immigration, healthcare, rent control, the minimum wage, free speech, taxation, privacy, religious freedom, education, and food safety. For individuals to perform such tasks as mirroring the justificatory relations of lawmakers, accessing then judging a common evidential basis, or gaining a significant level of understanding or deliberative abilities with respect to only a few laws in each of these categories would undermine their capacity to purse the goods that the state aims to protect. Public justification is therefore in danger of being self-defeating as a political theory under a high-standard view. 2.2. Interlude Those who want to retain a high-standard view must react by modifying the Public Justification Principle. As currently stated, this principle is satisfied with respect to a law just when every reasonable person can become justified in the relevant sense in accepting that the law ought to be obeyed. If we suppose that the relevant sense of justification corresponds to a high-standard view, the basic problem is that when a person has a justificatory capacity of n laws and the state imposes at least n+1 laws, this person cannot be justified in accepting all these laws in the relevant sense. Defenders of a high-standard view must hold their preferred sense of justification constant while changing the sense of ‘can’. They will likely opt for a sense that is hypothetical. They could say, for instance, that the Public Justification Principle is satisfied just when every person can be justified in accepting a particular law were it the case that the number of laws each person cared about did not exceed her justificatory capacity and the law in question was among 26 them. Or, were it the case that all persons had enough spare time to master the justification for the law. Yet adopting any such hypothetical senses of ‘can’ creates a problem: It is tantamount to giving up the goal of perspectival conciliation. Critics of Public Reason Liberalism have already made this point. 37 It can be true that a person would be justified in accepting a law were she to have the spare time to master its justification while also being true that she appropriately considers the law to be unacceptable given the time she has. Of course, it is generally recognized that appealing to hypothetical conditions is appropriate in some cases, such as when an intoxicated person is unable to consent to a lifesaving medical procedure. 38 But cases of incapacitation are relevantly different from lacking justification for accepting a law simply because one chooses to pursue a reasonable array of goods while having normal powers of reason. I accordingly share the worry of critics that appealing to hypotheticals allows us to say that laws are publicly justified at the cost of inappropriately separating public justification and the basic idea of perspectival conciliation. At the same time, I think that defenders of high-standard views also have a point. Rejecting all hypothetical standards is not a promising alternative. Let us concede that we must avoid the possibility of the law’s being publicly justified to reasonable persons who are not conciliated with the law. To do so, we must endorse at least a low-standard view according to which a law’s being publicly justified requires that all persons can be justified in accepting the law. The sense of ‘can’ here must be undemanding enough for the Public Justification Principle 37 See, for instance, Enoch 2015, pp. 127-128 and Bertram 1997, p. 574. 38 Enoch 2015, p. 129. 27 to be satisfied through the government’s offering testimony about the law. But suppose we endorse no more than such a view. The outcome is that in some cases laws will be publicly justified even though some persons would not be justified in accepting the law were they to have enough spare time to comprehend its high-standard justification or the broader circumstances relevant to the law’s impostion. Transparencia is by stipulation not such a case, since the testimony the legislators give supporting W is backed by reasons that all can accept. But a case like this would occur if such reasons did not exist and the legislators simply lied about the law. A case like this could occur in an idealized context if the legislators reasonably but mistakenly thought that they were basing the law on reasons that everyone could accept. Public Reason Liberals should hesitate to say that the law is publicly justified in such cases. Mere testimony may justify in some sense, but it shouldn’t suffice for public justification. There must also be a hypothetical condition compatible with something like a high-standard view that is met, for example that persons would continue to be justified in accepting the law were they aware of the further reasons supporting it or other relevant factors. This is a significant result. Note that such a hypothetical imposes a strongly externalist condition on public justification: It can be met (or not met) even though persons cannot become aware that it is met (or not met) through any reasonably expectable amount of reflection or investigation. At the same time, a low-standard, epistemically internalist condition must also be met for public justification, one that is reflectively accessible without too much effort from everyone’s perspective. I suggest that we accommodate these results by adopting a hybrid view according to which neither perspectival conciliation nor public justification occur unless both 28 these internal and external conditions are met. 39 That these conditions are satisfied simultaneously must not be a matter of chance or accident. At least one way this can happen is by the political authority appropriately giving testimony about the law that is based on reasons constituting a high-standard of justification. 2.3. The Limited Resources Argument, Part 2 Proponents of high-standard views are likely to still be unsatisfied at this point. Surely it is not enough for a law’s public justification, they will say, that citizens are told a few things about the law, even if what they are told is appropriately based on more complex reasons. The government must additionally provide a pathway to appreciating the reasons constituting a high-standard justification. 40 Call the statement that if a law ought to be publicly justified, then the government ought to provide a pathway to such a justification for inquisitive citizens willing and able to take it the Pathway Proviso. In short, this proviso says that governments have a duty to leave no inquisitive citizens behind when it comes to the justification of a law. Nevertheless, adding this proviso once again makes satisfying the Public Justification Principle too demanding. It leads to what I call the inquisitive citizens problem. Imagine that you are part of the legislative body that has imposed W on the citizens of Transparencia and you want 39 This hybrid view is unique among conceptions of public justification. Almost all other conceptions presuppose a sense of justification that is merely internalist. See Rawls 2005, p. 118 and 1997, p. 771; Gaus 2010, p. 184; Larmore 2015, pp. 82-83; Quong 2011, pp. 141-142; and Vallier 2019, pp. 41-42. An exception is Gaus in Justificatory Liberalism, where he argues that public justification requires “open justification,” which is “weakly externalist” in that it is undermined by defeaters that a person may encounter. (1996, pp. 31-32) Yet open justification is not undermined by defeaters that persons cannot be reasonably expected to encounter, unlike the hybrid view’s externalist condition. (Gaus 1996, p. 35) 40 By a ‘pathway’, I mean something like a series of steps which, if taken, result in achieving a high standard of justification. 29 to make sure the law satisfies the Public Justification Principle. Accordingly, you hold a Public Justification Town Hall to justify W to anyone who wants to come. Because everyone knows that the Public Justification Principle ought to be satisfied, everyone is expecting you to adhere to your own principles, including your commitment to leave no inquisitive citizen behind. The meeting starts as expected. You ask if everyone is justified in accepting W at least insofar as your testimony that W is a good law is credible, and they say yes. Then someone asks for a statement justifying W and you give it, J 0. Then someone asks for a statement justifying J 0 and you give it, J 1. (Perhaps justifications are not always as stilted, but they can be modeled as going on through something like this process.) This keeps up until you reach statement J n, at which point you realize you are running out of time. Yet the citizens continue to sincerely request more because they have not yet reached a high-standard of justification. You are suddenly filled with dread, because you plan to impose many other laws, and you expect each will be as difficult to justify as W. Because a theory of public justification should not include an assumption about how inquisitive citizens will be, such an escalating situation cannot be ruled out in principle. One might suggest that the government set aside resources into a ‘public justification fund’, and only offer justifications until this fund is exhausted. This suggestion, while prudent, does not solve the problem. If the government’s obligation to justify laws according to a high-standard is important, then it is equally important that the government justify why it cannot meet this obligation. When this fund is exhausted, the government ought to justify both that it has been exhausted and why it could not have been made larger. Since either fact is no more reflectively accessible to the 30 inquisitive citizens than considerations that bear directly on the acceptability of a law, the result is still either resource exhaustion or a violation of the Pathway Proviso. The inquisitive citizen problem shows that the theory of public justification is again in danger of being too demanding in a self-defeating way, this time not for citizens but for governments. Since governments ought not be committed to exhausting their resources on public justifications, it seems that the Pathway Proviso is false. One may be tempted to respond that the Pathway Proviso should be amended to state that a pathway must exist only within reason. I am sympathetic to this thought, but ‘within reason’ demands explanation. Offering such an explanation is the purpose of the next section, which completes my argument that Transparencia is an example of how dependence on testimony can suffice for public justification. 41 3. An Explanation Based on Trust To understand better what ‘within reason’ could mean, we should examine what motivates our judgments about the right level of justification. That level seems in many cases above the justification available in Transparencia and below that available at the end of the inquisitive citizens problem. At the same time, it does not seem plausible for this level to remain invariant 41 Our limited resources such as reasoning power and time, as well as the extent to which persons care about the social order being justified to them, are aspects of what Rawls calls “the subjective circumstances of justice.” (2005, p. 66) Although Rawls is aware of these particular aspects, he does not adequately acknowledge the difficulty they pose for meeting requirements of publicity. For instance, he says that a full justification of the public conception of justice need be only publicly available, as opposed to publicly known, because “some will not want to carry philosophical reflection about public life so far.” (2005, p. 67) But he considers neither that some might want to carry such reflection further than their resources allow – thus leading to the busy citizens problem – nor that some might want to carry such reflection further than what political authorities have the capacity to accommodate – thus leading to the inquisitive citizens problem. I thank an anonymous reviewer for urging me to add this observation. 31 across cases. Sometimes a higher and sometimes a lower level of justification is necessary to satisfy the Public Justification Principle. The most plausible explanation for these judgments involves trust. It will take some term- building to see how. Trust, as I mean it, is an attitude in which a person relies on a subject in spite of an un-eliminated possibility of error. 42 We can roughly say that the level to which person S trusts a subject Q that p is given by the stake that would be lost by S if not-p, as well as both the amount and quality of S’s assurances that p independent of Q. A large stake and few or poor assurances yield high trust. High-trust situations are not always high-risk situations because risk as I understand it here is an object feature of our situation. I can have high trust that my climbing partner will not drop the only rope holding me when she can get away with it (for instance, if I have little opportunity to vet her character and training) even if there is in fact a low risk that she will do so. Trust has both an actual and a prospective sense. S can say, ‘I don’t trust Q very much that p’ even if S is not trusting Q concerning p in any way. I can say, for instance, ‘I don’t trust Jones very much that my money will be safe with him’, even if I am not now trusting Jones to keep my money safe and never have. In cases like these, ‘trust’ is used prospectively. The level of prospective trust you put in a subject is the level of actual trust that you are willing to put in that subject. To be willing to put some level of actual trust in a subject means that if the subject 42 Trust is typically considered an interpersonal attitude distinct from reliance or prediction. (Vallier 2019, pp. 25- 26) I intend my use of ‘trust’ to be consistent with this view without requiring it because this relation may be held towards both persons and institutions. In the latter case it is arguably closer to a mode of reliance than an interpersonal attitude. See Gelfert 2014, p. 177. 32 requests your actual trust up to that level, then you give it. If you are willing to put high actual trust in a subject, then prospectively you trust that subject highly, and vice versa. Finally, there is default trust. 43 S’s default trust in Q is given by the highest prospective trust that Q is entitled to normatively expect from S about something. Default trust is the trust you can normatively expect others to place in you without further interaction with them, given the details of the context and your past interactions. Default trust can accumulate for new trust situations in various ways, such as by others seeing that their trust in you has been well placed in the past. Now we’re ready for the explanation. Justifications play an important role in building and maintaining trust relations in that giving a justification that p results in lowering the actual trust you demand of others in demanding that they rely on you that p. In the limit, justifications eliminate the need for trust between persons entirely. This happens when your justification of p to someone consists in showing her that p can be readily deduced from beliefs that she already firmly held before your interaction. When the level of actual trust demanded in a situation is greater than the level of default trust, a justification is needed to bridge the gap. Once it is bridged, however, any further justification is superfluous and cannot be properly demanded from the other party. The inquisitive citizen problem exemplifies a superfluous demand. So, to say that a government must provide a pathway to higher justification ‘within reason’ is to say that such a pathway must be provided only to the extent that it is necessary to bridge the gap between the actual trust demanded in a case and the default trust in that case. It may be kind or helpful to 43 My notion of default trust is idiosyncratic in that it carries no connotation of unreflectiveness and is expected by default by the trustee, not given by default by the truster. For contrasting uses of default trust, see Railton 2004, p. 186 and Walker 2006, pp. 83-85. 33 provide justification that p to inquisitive citizens once you can normatively expect them to trust you that p, but it is not required. You are permitted to leave them behind. This account plausibly suggests a relationship between trust and public justification that is significantly different from the one proposed in recent work by Kevin Vallier. Vallier offers what one might call a justification-first account: The public justification of a number of social norms or laws is a necessary condition for trusting that others will comply with those norms or laws. 44 The present account, by contrast, is trust-first. Testimony must be trusted in order to have justificatory force. So, if testimony about a norm or law brings about its public justification in a case, trusting that testimony is a necessary condition for justification in that case. Vallier might reply that trust in testimony presupposes the public justification of various social norms governing speech acts, such as assertion. But this in turn raises the question of how these norms came to be justified. I claim – but cannot here prove – that the dialectic must bottom out in normative expectations that others trust various sources of information, such as perception, memory, and testimony. The idea that trust is a necessary condition for the rational justification of our beliefs has been suggested by several philosophers. 45 Unfortunately, I do not have the space to pursue the contrast further here; I offer it as an issue worth further inquiry. 46 Irrespective of how this dialectic turns out, the fact remains that testifiers can properly expect others to accept their testimony only if there is no gap between the level of actual trust acceptance of their testimony requires in a case and the level of default trust in that case. What 44 Vallier 2019, pp. 6, 68, 72, 143-144. 45 See, for example, Lehrer 1997, p. 6; Foley 2001, p. 4; Railton 2004, p. 186; and Wright 2004, p. 194. 46 I see my view as overall complimenting Vallier’s in that it provides additional reason to join him in thinking there is an important relation between trust and public justification. Another way I take our views to contrast is that Vallier does not consider the role justification plays in lowering the need for trust and thereby making public justification possible. 34 influences the level of default trust in a case is a complex topic. But we ought to at least agree that high levels of default trust are possible. High levels of default trust often exist between persons in general society. We are normatively expected to not opt out of many daily tasks where others could injure or exploit us, such as sharing a seat on public transportation, being alone with a stranger, or responding to a request for assistance. At the limit, levels of default trust can become so high that testifiers do not need to provide extra assurances to properly expect others to accept their testimony. When levels of default trust reach this limit, we have a minimal case in which the Pathway Proviso can be satisfied, namely, a case in which no pathway is required. Transparencia is an instance of such a minimal case. A high enough level of default trust has built up in Transparencia that the government no longer needs to provide a pathway to higher justification to properly expect their citizens to accept its content. My claim is not that levels of trust in Transparencia were always this high; the political authorities plausibly had to make more of a pathway available to the citizens in the past to establish their testimonial track record supporting this high level of trust. But given that a high level of trust has been achieved, the testimony about W contained in the email, so long as it is backed by considerations of the right kind that are external from the perspectives of the Transparencia citizens, suffices for W’s public justification. Although it might be nice of the government to provide more of a pathway, it is not required. Dependence on testimony is accordingly compatible with satisfying the Public Justification Principle. 35 4. Extent of Dependence. In non-ideal situations, where there is more danger that testifiers are deceiving us or fail to establish an excellent testimonial track record, levels of default trust cannot be as high as in Transparencia. Laws consequently require more substantial justification than W in many cases. Either the content of testimony about the law must be more complex, or a more extensive path to higher justification must be available for inquisitive citizens willing and able to take it. Nevertheless, accepting this content or following this path often must involve some persons depending on testimony. So, in many cases, dependence on pure informative testimony is necessary for public justification. This dependence is often necessary because we have limited resources of reasoning power and time. The acceptability of laws in many cases rests on the status of empirical claims. People ought to accept gun regulations only if they would in fact reduce gun violence; accept immigration reforms only if they would in fact not have significant negative impact on the economy and public safety; accept vaccination regimens only if they would in fact substantially improve public health; accept environmental regulations only if they would in fact substantially contribute to the wellbeing of humans and their habitat; and so forth. Empirical considerations are even central to the acceptance of daylight savings time laws, with proponents of perpetual Daylight Saving Time pointing to studies purportedly showing that switching times increases the number of heart attacks 47 and opponents of perpetual DST pointing to studies purportedly 47 Sandhu, Seth, and Gurm, 2014. 36 showing that switching decreases crime rates. 48 It is no exaggeration to say that empirical considerations crucially bear on almost every policy in ways similar to those just stated. Confirming or disconfirming such empirical claims requires complex methods of investigation, such as statistical analysis, computer modeling, and a myriad of domain-specific techniques. As such methods become increasingly advanced, we require increasingly more technical knowledge and training not only to understand the theory of how these methods work but also to assess particular instances of their application. This comes at a cost from the standpoint of high-standard views of public justification. More complex justifications are more difficult to appreciate in the ways these views demand. At the same time, we should not seek to limit the use of complex methods. The success of science to predict and control events shows that such methods are our best way for knowing or at least confirming empirical claims relevant to laws, even if we may question the extent to which science reveals the underlying metaphysical structure of the world. I admit that many of the above remarks are themselves empirical claims, but they are ones that many readers will agree are confirmed by their experience. The result is that while political philosophers have acknowledged that experts of some kind are helpful in making decisions about which laws to accept, 49 this turns out to be an understatement. Experts are not just helpful. In many cases, we cannot reasonably expect individuals to be justified in accepting a law without depending on the testimony of one or more persons that the empirical evidence 48 Doleac and Sanders 2015. 49 For instance, Gaus 2011, p. 252. 37 adequately supports the law’s imposition. 50 This testimony is the product of a complex network of testifiers comprised of politicians, scientific experts, members of the media, and so forth in which citizens are embedded and through which their connection to a high-standard justification is mediated. We should consequently expect features of these networks such as their arrangement and composition to crucially influence whether a law is publicly justified. 51 This is the case even though we cannot reasonably expect citizens to discriminate whether the networks in which they are embedded have such features. Accordingly, what these features are and how they influence public justification is worth considering. 5. Consequences and Prospects. Providing a full theory of testimonial networks and their relation to public justification is a massive undertaking. My intention in what follows is to consider a few very simplified examples to give the reader a rough idea of the relevant considerations. A testimonial network can be 50 Epistemologists have often observed that the ideal of the autonomous knower, who frequently depends on none but herself in gaining knowledge, is not only unrealistic but undesirable. See, for example, Fricker 2006, and Hardwig 1985. My main contention in this section is that we cannot and should not see our political situation as an exception to this general observation. 51 This conclusion cross-cuts issues concerning the relevance of scientific expertise to public justification, such as the expert identification problem and the interpretation of Rawls’ stricture that we may appeal to scientific results in justifications when they are based on methods and conclusions that are not controversial. (Rawls 2005, p. 224) No matter whether one thinks that both the methods and conclusions of science must be non-controversial among the public to meet this stricture – like Jønch-Clausen and Kappel (2016, p. 123) – or that only methods must be – like Badiola (2018, p. 429) – either aspect of science often cannot be accepted by the public except through trusting testimony. And even if philosophers such as Anderson in her 2011 are correct that the public is generally competent to judge which experts are trustworthy, the public often cannot be expected to reliably apply the criteria for making these judgments without trusting testimony. A typical citizen often cannot judge whether a purported expert is “continuing to repeat claims after they have been publicly refuted” or is “advancing crackpot theories” without depending on someone’s testimony that the refutation in question has occurred or that the purported theories in question fail to meet minimum scientific standards. (Anderson 2011, pp. 147-148) 38 thought of as a set of persons and the various relations of testimonial dependence between them that constrains how they exchange information. The networks I consider contain just three citizens, A, B, and C. I presuppose that there is a law that C cannot be justified in accepting without first being justified in accepting a proposition, p. To accept this proposition, C must depend on the testimony from A and B in the way each network describes. A person’s assertion that p in a network is an outcome of her applying a set of relevant norms to a set of relevant propositional information. A norm or item of information is relevant just when a person either relies on it in assessing whether p or she judges that she should have relied on it. The networks I consider are idealizations both in that each person accepts a proposition only if she thinks doing so accords with her own norms and information and in that each person’s information is coherent with respect to the perspective of every other person. For instance, if ~q is in C’s information set, then q is not in the information set of anyone else. The simplifying idea is that disagreements among persons in the network arise only concerning how to judge the information held in common between them. By making such relations clear, we can consider what impact each kind of network has on p’s public justification. In a Disparate-Norms Network, the set of epistemic norms that A, B, and C each ascribe to are all non-identical. This would seemingly make justifications fragile, so Public Reason Liberals may be disposed to not pay this network much attention. Suppose that C is committed to accepting an epistemic norm only if it is consistent with current science. However, on the norms that A is committed to, it is permissible to accept propositions by reading tea-leaves. Suppose that A accepts that p on this basis and could not have relied any other norm to do so. C and B need not know this. In fact, testifiers often do not make explicit the source of the information 39 they report. 52 Furthermore, the network is arranged such that C must accept that p by depending on B’s testimony that p, and B in turn must accept that p by depending on A’s testimony that p. Public Reason Liberals would likely find it implausible that p is publicly justified for C in this network. The presentation of p is identical from C’s perspective to a case where B and A have the same norms as her. But if C were informed of A’s norms and information, C would not accept that p given A’s information because C would not accept A’s norms. In short, a principle one might want to adopt for incorporating testimony into the theory of public justification is that p is publicly justified to C as the product of a network of testifiers only if C’s norms and information would not cause her to retract her acceptance that p upon learning the relevant norms and information of each testifier and how that testifier contributed to the network. In Chapter 4, I will return to consider whether this principle is plausible and whether this kind of network is as inhospitable to public justification as it seems. In a Shared-Norms Network, by contrast, all persons accept propositions according to the same norms. Assume that the persons in a Shared-Norms Network are in this condition not by chance but because they are jointly committed to finding a set of shared epistemic standards for their judgments. In an instance of such a network where the testimonial dependence relations are arranged in the same way as the one just described, the proposition p would plausibly be publicly justified to C. This network’s downside, however, is that acquiring and preserving a set of shared epistemic norms will be difficult in large networks under conditions of reasonable pluralism about norms. In this respect, such networks are arguably too idealistic and, if they exist 52 Goldberg 2018, p. 102. 40 at all, easily change into a Disparate-Norms Network when new members join them or old members acquire new beliefs. 53 The Encapsulated-State Network avoids some of the problems of the other two. In this network, C does not directly depend on any individual highly but rather on the network as a whole. This is because in this network p is asserted by the group (perhaps a government) according to internal procedures each member is committed to following. Suppose, for instance, that p is not ‘asserted’ by the group composed of A and B unless the assertion is voted approved by every member. If B adheres to norms C would accept and A adheres to tea-leaf-reader norms that C would not accept, C can nevertheless be justified in accepting the testimony that p from the group, even if A is the one who asserts that p. This is because the rules of the group ensure that none of its members asserts that p unless there is someone in the group who accepts p in a way that C would endorse. A disadvantage of the Encapsulated-State Network is that this outcome depends on a representative existing in the group whose norms and information are compatible with C’s and on the voting procedure requiring unanimity. With a majority voting procedure, it can happen that p is asserted by the group when all those who share C’s norms form a minority that votes against assertion. Acceptance of p would not be justified for C in such a case. Yet insisting against 53 The contrast between the disparate and shared norms networks adds a level of complexity to the debate between convergence and consensus views of public justification. Both views hold that public justification requires everyone to have sufficient reason to accept the law. But whereas convergence theorists hold that the reasons people have to accept the law can be different, consensus theorists hold that these reasons must be the same, or at least mutually acceptable. The propensity of testimony to mask the reasons supporting it suggests an extra challenge for convergence theorists, since a network of testifiers with different and incompatible reasons, like the Disparate-Norms Network, is liable to produce merely apparent public justifications. At the same time, the encapsulated and extended state networks below suggest that persons giving testimony on the basis of different reasons can nevertheless publicly justify laws. So, while testimonial networks are relevant to the debate between consensus and convergence views of public justification, their implications for this debate are not straightforward. I hope to pursue this issue in future work. 41 a majority voting procedure is not likely to be practically viable because a unanimous vote is often difficult to obtain. Finally, there is the Extended-State Network. B is an agent outside the government whose norms and information are compatible with C’s. A is a representative in the government who asserts that p but whose norms are not compatible with C’s. Instead of B’s giving her own rationale for every assertion A makes, C knows that if A’s assertions are not acceptable according to C’s norms and information, then B will speak against them. Otherwise, B remains silent. So, in this network, it is not A’s testimony that justifies C’s acceptance that p but rather A’s testimony in combination with B’s silence that ~p. 54 The advantage of the Extended-State Model is that in enables persons to justifiably accept propositions even if no one whose norms and information are compatible with hers represents her in the government. A disadvantage is that it will be difficult for the government to co-ordinate with agents outside it like B. There is no mechanism within the government that ensures that it will not create a law that such agents will correctly identify as not justified based on their norms. This cursory survey by no means exhausts the possible models of testimonial networks. It also leaves much out, such as what influences justification when there are a vast number of testifiers, how conflicting testimony or information influences justification, and so forth. These and other topics are plausibly worth further inquiry. 54 For an extended discussion of how such silences can function as testimony, see Goldberg 2010, ch. 6. 42 6. Conclusion. By now we have seen that testimony is in many cases necessary for public justification. The limitations of resources like reasoning power and time frequently require us to trust the testimony of others to gain conciliation with the laws that political authorities impose. Whether the Public Justification Principle is satisfied consequently must depend somehow on the properties of the network of testifiers through which we receive this testimony and whether this network appropriately connects us to a higher standard of justification. In realistic cases, this means that conciliation may not in fact be warranted even though it appears to be from our limited perspectives. To take a broader, speculative look, this view of public justification suggests that a desire for a deeper conciliation with our social world cannot be satisfied. Hegel remarks that, “Human beings must acknowledge and scrutinize in their own thoughts whatever is said to be normative, whatever in the world is said to be authoritative; what is to rank as established must have authenticated itself by means of thought.” 55 It is difficult to not hear a similar sentiment behind Waldron’s oft-quoted line expressing the spirit motivating public justification that opened this essay. We may expect what is authoritative to explain itself at the tribunal of our understanding, but for better or worse, the increasing complexity of the social order makes grasping such explanations frequently impossible. While this order has given us an unprecedented store of communal knowledge, on the individual level it has resulted in the facts receding behind a veil of testimony. Some persons of privilege may see further behind this veil than others, but no one 55 Hegel 1990, pp. 131-132. 43 can penetrate it completely. The most we plausibly ought to hope for at this point is that through building political communities that foster trust and constructing testimonial networks that are good in the right ways, we can make life under this veil more than bearable. 44 Chapter 2; Powerful Deceivers and Public Reason Liberalism: An Argument for Externalization The previous chapter made the case that our pervasive dependence on testimony to form our beliefs about which political rules are acceptable is compatible with the Public Justification Principle and its status as a guide for reconciling our need for collective order with the inevitability of perspectival diversity. Again, the basic idea of public justification is that it brings about perspectival conciliation though motivating people to comply with rules because they are acceptable to their perspectives. Public Reason Liberals urge us to consider this strictly preferable to inducing compliance with rules through force or trickery. Something is after all surely wrong when, in spite of our making a good-faith effort to agree, others impose rules on us that are acceptable from their perspectives but not from ours. Our pervasive dependence on testimony required us to adopt a hybrid notion of public justification according to which the rules indeed have to be acceptable to the perspectives of all reasonable people, but whether those rules have the status as publicly justified to some extent depends on factors that are not reflectively accessible to all reasonable people. In this chapter, I make the case that the theory of public justification has to be modified yet further with epistemically externalist conditions. I do this by pressing a new instance of what has been called an agent-type challenge to the Public Justification Principle. 56 One of these challenges was used to dismiss the view called Starry-Eyed Rationalism in the Introduction. To 56 The term ‘agent-type challenge’ is from Gaus [2014]. See Quong [2011: 8, 37] and Van Schoelandt [2015] for additional discussion. 45 apply a hackneyed version of such a challenge to the Public Justification Principle, just consider that prejudiced and vicious people will always object to restraints on vice and prejudice. If the Public Justification Principle required governments to act only in ways that are justifiable to everyone, then governments must act only in ways that are justifiable to reprehensible people. Justice thereby becomes captive to the unjust. Public reason liberals have two typical replies to such agent-type challenges [Van Schoelandt 2015: 1032]. Let the justificatory constituency be the agents to whom rules must be justifiable to be legitimate. The first reply – which has already been previewed in the Introduction – is for public reason liberals to say that the justificatory constituency consists only of people with appropriate moral commitments, namely reasonable people, and argue that challenging types are not in this group. The second reply is use idealization to discount some failures of justification, such as to those who have improperly responded to evidence by their own standards. I argue that these replies fail to address the challenge of a type of agent that is all-too- common in our societies: the powerful deceiver. Powerful deceivers manipulate people of other agent types into believing that particular rules are unjustified. Their victims can be both reasonable and properly responding to evidence by their own standards in holding this belief. That is, people can be tricked by powerful deceivers in spite of doing their part to make a good- faith effort to agree. Powerful deceivers reveal a new way of making justice captive to the unjust: they manipulate people supposedly within the justificatory constituency. Avoiding the challenge of powerful deceivers requires substantially revising public justification and related notions. Some authors have said that agent-type challenges require public reason liberals to reject that there is a special connection between public justification and 46 legitimacy [ibid.: 1042]. I disagree. I argue instead that avoiding the challenge of powerful deceivers requires that we place a strong epistemically externalist condition on whether a person is in a rule’s justificatory constituency . 57 On my view, what matters for whether someone is in this constituency is not only whether she has been reasonable or rational in responding to facts internal to her perspective. Some particular external facts about what caused her perspective matter too, even though she cannot reasonably be expected to become aware they are true. Externalizing Public Reason Liberalism in this way to avoid the challenge of powerful deceivers requires modeling public justification as a relationship between the government and the public. On this model, a rule’s legitimacy requires that only the government does its part to uphold this relationship. But any relationship can fail even though each party does its part. Powerful deceivers produce this failure of public justification when they manipulate otherwise reasonable people into believing that the government is imposing unjustified rules. Because public justification is morally important, externalizing Public Reason Liberalism promises insight into what is wrong with documented cases of deception. It also preserves Public Reason Liberalism’s claim to better reconcile order and diversity so as to get us further away from a rat- king life than competing theories like Comprehensive Perfectionism. 57 As I explain below, public reason liberals consider public justification a merely epistemically internalist notion. See Rawls [2005: 118], Gaus [2010: 184-5], Quong [2011: 141-2], Van Schoelandt [2015: 1043], Larmore [2015: 69- 70, 82-3], and Vallier [2020: 1112]. 47 1. Why Public Reason Liberals Reject Externalism Since ‘Internal’ and ‘external’ are terms of art, let’s refresh ourselves on what they mean. Something is considered epistemically internal for a person just when it is easily accessible to her awareness through introspection, deliberation, or investigation, perhaps at nearby possible worlds. What is not easily accessible is epistemically external. Internal facts can be easily and rationally accepted through introspection, deliberation, or investigation. External facts cannot. To illustrate, imagine you must name the world’s fifth highest mountain while playing trivia. You distinctly recall a long-lost friend mentioning that Mount Makalu is the fifth highest mountain and being a credible testifier. This is a fact internal to your perspective. You can easily and rationally form other beliefs on its basis, most obviously that Mount Makalu is the answer. Facts you cannot easily access about what caused this belief are external, such as whether your friend gained his information from the November 1989 edition of National Geographic. Public reason liberals have traditionally considered external facts (so characterized) irrelevant to public justification. Public reason is about finding considerations accessible to diverse perspectives to justify common rules. External facts about the causal origin of a person’s beliefs are not accessible. According to public reason liberals, suitably accessible justifications are ultimately based on facts internal for those to whom they are addressed. 58 58 Rawls [2005: 118] and Vallier [2019: 41-2] explicitly state that external facts about what caused a person’s beliefs are irrelevant to public justification. Footnote2 further documents commitment to epistemic internalism in Public Reason Liberalism. 48 This commitment to internalism is readily expressed in typical statements of the basic idea behind the Public Justification Principle. Consider again some of the statements we have already seen. Thomas Nagel says in an early discussion that public justification enables appropriate use of political power through requiring that, “it must be possible to present to others the basis of your own beliefs, so that once you have done so, they have what you have, and can arrive at a judgement on the same basis” [1987: 232]. Similarly, Charles Larmore says public justification is about motivating others to comply with rules by their seeing “the very reasons we ourselves have” for imposing them as opposed to their fearing “the consequences of non-compliance” [2015: 78]. Gerald Gaus also states that if a rule is publicly justified, then others can accept it by seeing reasons that are reflectively accessible from their perspectives instead of by social pressure [2011: 29-30]. A commitment to internalism is also readily expressed in the grounds that public reason liberals have adduced to explain the Public Justification Principle’s moral importance. The following grounds are widely considered most plausible: (i) Justice (ii) Respect (iii) Autonomy (iv) Co-authorship (v) Stability (vi) Civic Friendship (vii) Social Trust (viii) Accountability Practices 49 Some public reason liberals claim that the failure of public justification is incompatible with justice because justice requires that citizens can view exercises of political authority as acceptable from a sharable standpoint [Quong 2014: 273-5]. Some claim it is incompatible with respect because respect requires not coercing others on the basis of reasons they cannot appreciate [Gaus 2011: 17; Larmore 2015: 78]. Some claim it is incompatible with autonomy because autonomy requires not coercing others on the basis of reasons they cannot have willed themselves [Quong 2014: 270-1]. Some claim it is incompatible with co-authorship because political authorities purporting to involve their citizens as legislative co-authors are required to act only in ways citizens can be reasonably expected to endorse [Bird 2014: 201-4]. Some claim it is incompatible with stability because those who do not consider themselves to have sufficient reason to accept political authority will disobey it [Rawls 2005: 140-4]. Some claim it is incompatible with civic friendship because such friendship involves citizens’ cooperative exercise of government power for mutual benefit [Ebels-Duggan 2010: 55-6; Leland and van Wietmarschen 2017: 159-160]. Some claim it is incompatible with social trust because people will distrust political authority without sufficient reason to consider its actions justified [Vallier 2019: 6, 68, 72, 143-4]. And finally, some claim it is incompatible with accountability practices because holding someone accountable to a rule is appropriate only if she has sufficient reason to accept it that is easily reflectively accessible [Gaus 2011: 250, 481]. Although no public reason liberal endorses all these alleged grounds, every public reason liberal claims at least one of them is the ground of the Public Justification Principle. However, each alleged ground is undermined when the government imposes rules on someone without sufficient justification by internal facts. This undermines justice because even if the government 50 knows that a rule is justified on the basis of external facts, she cannot easily share this knowledge. This also undermines civic friendship. She cannot view others who advocate for the rule as cooperative partners in exercising government power because the rule lacks support from her perspective. And so on. Any defense of the Public Justification Principle that public reason liberals might give consequently involves appealing to a favored morally important ground and saying it is undermined when a rule is insufficiently supported by internal facts. Insisting that external facts matter for public justification seems equivalent to denying the importance of the alleged ground and discounting some perspectives merely because they are wrong. This explains why agent-type challenges are challenging: Public reason liberals risk contradicting their principles if they dismiss some agents because their views are incorrect. To avoid this result, public reason liberals build internalist constraints into their replies to agent-type challenges. Consider the reply of restricting the justificatory constituency to reasonable people. ‘Reasonable’ is another term of art. As mentioned earlier, public reason liberals characterize reasonable people as willing to propose and abide by fair terms of cooperation for mutual benefit, provided others do likewise [Rawls 2005: 54; Quong 2011: 38]. This addresses the objection that the Public Justification Principle makes justice captive to agents like Nazis and racists. These people are not reasonable; the terms of cooperation they propose are not remotely fair. Distinguishing the reasonable from the unreasonable excludes some people from the justificatory constituency. This proposal’s supporters claim it nevertheless accommodates diverse perspectives because it accommodates diverse perspectives among reasonable people 51 [Quong 2011: 6, 8]. The Public Justification Principle requires not imposing rules that are unjustifiable to reasonable people. This is not because failure of public justification is evidence for other reasonable people that their perspectives have failed to meet an external requirement. Public reason liberals do not claim that reasonable people who disagree with each other must doubt that their perspectives correctly represent the world through external cognitive processes [Rawls 2005: 62-3; Larmore 2015: 70]. Public reason liberals claim instead that we should forebear acting in ways that are unjustified to reasonable people because of the moral worth that their being reasonable bestows on them [Bird 2014: 192-3; Larmore 2015: 77-9]. Once a person accepts an admissible conception of fairness and other normative concepts, being reasonable is only a matter of adhering to requirements with internal content, such as requirements of rational coherence. Internalist considerations also constrain how public reason liberals use idealization to avoid agent-type challenges. Idealization has been characterized as either “radical” – which I consider later – or “moderate” [Vallier 2020: 1110]. Under moderate idealization, a rule is justifiable to a person just when she either now can easily become aware of sufficient reason to accept it, or could have easily become aware of such reason, provided it remained undefeated by her own standards of belief revision in the meantime. Proponents of moderate idealization can respond to agent-type challenges by arguing that vicious and prejudiced people negligently failed to adhere to their own standards in acquiring the corrupt views that motivate them to reject rules [Vallier 2019: 23, 101-2; 2020: 1121]. Moderate idealization is compatible with accommodating a diverse plurality of perspectives. It merely demands that people adhere to their own standards without prescribing 52 what these standards must be, other than that they must be compatible with sharing a cooperative political life. 59 It is also compatible with Public Reason Liberalism’s commitment to internalism. Adhering to one’s own standards requires at most self-consistency [Vallier 2020: 1109-10, 1116]. External facts about what caused a person’s beliefs have no bearing on what is justifiable to her under moderate idealization because she cannot easily become aware of such facts by strictly following her own standards [ibid.: 1121]. 2. The Conceptual Challenge of Powerful Deceivers Using moderate idealization and making public justification owed only to reasonable people may avoid the challenge of agents like Nazis and racists. These strategies do not avoid the challenge of powerful deceivers, however. In this section, I show that the challenge of powerful deceivers is at least conceptually possible before examining realistic cases of deception in the next. Let us stipulate three main ways that powerful deceivers are powerful. First, their deception is highly convincing. Their victims cannot be reasonably expected to be rationally confident that they have been deceived, even if others tell them they are. Second, their deception is stable. Although their victims can eventually become disabused, this requires an unreasonably demanding amount of inquiry. And third, powerful deceivers apply their deception selectively. They deceive particular groups of people only insofar as necessary to make them believe an otherwise justified rule is unjustified. 59 This proviso excludes individuals who flout basic standards of rationality, such as that beliefs should be consistent and supported by adequate evidence. [Gaus 2011: 244; Vallier 2019: 23] 53 Of course, granting powerful deceivers too much power trivializes their challenge. They accordingly have three limitations. First, powerful deceivers can deceive others concerning only matters of fact. Second, deception cannot change people’s core values. Powerful deceivers can nevertheless deceive people about normatively important matters of fact. They could deceive others into believing that adopting a rule would cause many deaths but not into believing this fact is morally arbitrary. Third, powerful deceivers cannot deceive others concerning matters of fact they can easily verify. If a person held up five fingers before a group, a powerful deceiver could not make the group believe she held up three. Powerful deceivers instead manipulate by influencing intermediary evidence, like personal testimony or scientific reports. Given this characterization, powerful deceivers circumvent the typical responses to agent type challenges. Consider restricting public justification to reasonable people: People can be reasonable in that they are willing to cooperate on fair terms – even characteristically liberal ones – and yet believe by deception that rules consistent with those terms are unfair. For example, a powerful deceiver could produce rationally compelling but misleading evidence that a complex economic policy disadvantages some minority group beyond what any reasonable person would accept. Consider moderate idealization: Whether we ought to consider a rule consistent with our core values and standards of reasoning depends on judgments of internal fact. A person might reject a vaccination policy because she rationally yet falsely believes the vaccine produces dangerous side-effects. This belief could in turn be based on internal facts that a powerful deceiver caused her to believe, such as those associated with a credible but misleading scientific report. 54 These results are furthermore invariant under the admissible justificatory standards. We saw in the previous chapter that high-standard views must be inadmissible in order for theories of public justification to be compatible with our pervasive dependence on testimony. Other standards are still admissible. Some public reason liberals hold that public justification requires merely that persons have reasons for accepting a rule that are sufficient relative to their perspectives [Vallier 2020: 1112-3]. Others more demandingly hold that rules must be justifiable in terms of a reasonable balance of public values that are mutually acceptable to different perspectives [Rawls 2005: 243; Quong 2011: 219]. Powerful deception cannot be dismissed on either standard. Decreasing death and sickness are public values, and a reasonable balance of them may support a vaccine policy. A powerful deceiver could nevertheless convince a reasonable person that this is not the case or even that a balance of such values decisively speaks against the policy. If powerful deceivers can circumvent this more demanding standard, they can circumvent less demanding ones as well. In general, the challenge of powerful deceivers arises because they influence internal facts, and internal facts can support rational yet false beliefs. The typical responses of public reason liberals to agent-type challenges at most restrict the justificatory constituency to agents holding some particular values or responding self-consistently to internal facts. If governments are permitted to impose rules only if they are justifiable to such agents, then what governments can legitimately do is restricted by what powerful deceivers can make people consider unjustified. The only plausible way for public reason liberals to avoid this challenge is to externalize the justificatory constituency: Some reasonable people’s objections to the rules are properly 55 discounted based on external facts about what caused their beliefs, even though they cannot be reasonably expected to be aware these facts are true. One might object here: What about “radical” idealization? While moderate idealization involves identifying a person and asking whether she could accept a rule given her perspective and standards of reasoning, radical idealization involves asking whether the person could accept a rule given that her perspective and standards of reasoning were substantially modified, such as if she were completely informed or had developed her beliefs in a deception-free environment [Vallier 2020: 1114]. Radical idealization is thereby an instance of the ideal theory test favored by Rawlsians. Radical idealization avoids the challenge of powerful deceivers to some extent. According to this test, a rule imposed on a reasonable person deceived into rejecting it could still be publicly justified if she would accept it were she not deceived. There are nevertheless at least two reasons why powerful deceivers pose a significant challenge for radical idealization. First, externalist considerations are still relevant to individual judgments of public justification under radical idealization. Suppose a proponent of radical idealization confronts some reasonable people who object that a rule is not publicly justified. Appropriately deferring to their objection requires ruling out that a powerful deceiver caused their objections. The proponent must correctly judge either that they are not deceived or, if they are, that the rule would still be unjustifiable to them in a deception-free world. This judgement presupposes considerations about how people’s beliefs would change given modifications to their external environment. Proponents of radical idealization owe us an account of what the relevant considerations are before their theory can be appropriately used in contexts where 56 deception is suspected. Radical idealization thereby merely effects a shift in emphasis for the challenge rather than avoiding it. Second, radical idealization inadequately captures moral judgements about powerful deception. We saw that imposing rules insufficiently supported by internal facts undermines every ground that purportedly explains why public justification is morally important. Imposing rules on reasonable people deceived into rejecting them consequently creates a prima facie failure of public justification and should be to some extent morally regrettable. If radical idealization is correct, however, rules are in fact publicly justified as long as reasonable people could accept them were they not deceived. Radical idealization removes cause for regret, even though the alleged grounds for public justification are apparently unrealized. This is a more forceful version of a standard objection to Public Reason Liberalism. Critics observe that making public justification owed to a hypothetical constituency, such as individuals in a deception-free world, inadequately respects actual people. They are suspicious that it allows public reason liberals to say that public justification is owed only to people with some preferred normative commitments or theoretical outlooks, such as Public Reason Liberalism itself [Enoch 2015: 121-2]. But powerful deceivers can manipulate people regardless of their commitments or outlooks and can even target public reason liberals. Deceived persons can be doing their best to agree and cooperate on fair terms in objecting to the rules imposed on them. The Public Justification Principle is typically motivated by raising the specter of forcing such people to comply. Proponents of radical idealization might be able to show why forcing reasonable but deceived people to comply is not regrettable. But how to do this is unclear. It requires extra 57 motivation given that standard characterizations of the alleged grounds lack essential refence to radical idealization. 60 We saw above that radical idealization already presupposes externalist considerations. Consequently, an explicitly externalist view that preserves prima facie judgments of failures of public justification is preferable to radical idealization, all else being equal. The externalized Public Reason Liberalism I advocate meets this condition. 3. The Real Challenge of Powerful Deceivers By now I’ve shown that powerful deceivers pose a conceptual challenge for Public Reason Liberalism. Even if one accepts this, one might reject that powerful deceivers pose any practical challenge. It is therefore important to demonstrate that some individuals or groups in our actual political world act as powerful deceivers and manipulate others for their own ends. To establish this claim, I consider three factors that plausibly contribute to people becoming deceived and describe a realistic scenario in which this happens. The first factor is the expert identification problem. This is the problem of determining who is a trustworthy expert regarding issues about which one is not an expert [Goldman 2001; Anderson 2011]. Second is information overload, which happens when the information relevant to forming a belief about an issue exceeds a person’s capacity to adequately assess it, thereby making her vulnerable to a deceiver’s simplifications [Goodin 1980: 39, 58-61]. And third, undercutting inoculation occurs when a deceiver discredits rivals to undermine confidence in their claims [Hughes et al. 2014: 328]. 60 This is the case for both Watson and Hartley [2018: 80-2] and Quong [2011: 2], even though these authors favor views of Public Reason Liberalism that radically idealize the justificatory constituency. 58 When at least these three factors are present during a person’s belief formation, she can be rationally and reasonably deceived into believing that an otherwise justified rule is unjustified – not only in the sense that there is insufficient reason to accept it, but in the stronger sense that no reasonable balance of public values supports the rule. The following case shows how this could happen: Vicky and the Correctarians. Vicky does her best to be a good citizen while balancing responsibilities to her spouse, children, friends, and job. She lives under a democratic government that acts consistently with Public Reason Liberalism and is herself a public reason liberal. She is also a lifelong member of a large social group called the Correctarians. Though Vicky associates with some non-Correctarians, most of her friends and family are Correctarians and she considers being a Correctarian part of her identity. The views of the Correctarians are heavily influenced by a small number of leaders who have become corrupt. Suppose that the government proposes legislation that is supported by a reasonable balance of public values but that happens to undermine the Correctarian leaders’ self-interest. The leaders respond by encouraging media figures to promote misleading news stories that no reasonable balance of public values supports the legislation. When others produce stories to correct this misinformation, the Correctarian leaders promote even more stories casting doubt on these corrections. They additionally spread misinformation that the experts responsible for the legislation are proposing it out of their self-interest. Finally, they fund badly conducted but credible-looking studies to make the empirical claims supporting the legislation seem disputed. 59 Now consider the situation from Vicky’s perspective: She lacks the opportunity to learn first-hand that the Correctarian leaders are corrupt. When she sets out to form an opinion about the legislation, the quantity of information available overwhelms her. She consults people in her Correctarian community because she lacks the time to adequately sort through it herself. They make a persuasive case that no reasonable balance of public values supports the legislation. Some of her non-Correctarian friends try persuading her otherwise. When she challenges the empirical claims supporting their arguments, they appeal to scientific authorities. In her own research, Vicky found academic reports contradicting these authorities and credible exposés detailing how they are corrupt. After weighing all her evidence, Vicky believes that no reasonable balance of public values supports the legislation. Vicky is doing her best to be a good citizen and forms her beliefs in the same way as on many other issues, namely by relying on resources from her Correctarian community. Her belief that no reasonable balance of public values supports the legislation is nevertheless caused by misinformation spread by the Correctarian leaders. Vicky and the Correctarians does not describe a real event. But it does reflect a mix of aspects that are common in documented cases of deception: Industries can suppress the uptake of research by spreading misinformation that makes it difficult to identify accurate scientific reports [Michaels 2008; Oreskes and Conway 2011; Harker 2015: ch. 10; O’Connor and Weatherall 2019: ch. 3]. Tobacco industries, for instance, manipulated scientific research to undermine belief that smoking causes cancer [Michaels 2008: ch. 7; Oreskes and Conway 2011: ch. 1, 244]. Furthermore, political leaders and media figures use information overload to 60 influence public opinion [Paul and Matthews 2016; Tavernise and Gardiner 2019; Illing 2020]. On the 28 th of March 2020, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro publicly characterized the enforcement of Coronavirus lockdowns by local officials as “a crime” [Simões and Stargardter 2020]. This generated a surge of misinformation on social media and widespread public resistance to health measures combating the pandemic [Soares et al. 2021: 1, 4-5]. And finally, attacks meant to undermine trust in rival epistemic authorities are a staple of political misinformation [McKay and Tenove 2020: 6]. Claims by former US president Donald Trump and his supporters that the 2020 election was stolen contributed to distrust in electoral systems and the prevalent belief among Republicans that the inauguration of his successor, Joseph Biden, was illegitimate [Frenkel 2020]. My point is not that these examples consist in the deception of large numbers of reasonable and rational people. Deception might work in the vast majority of cases by exploiting people’s ill-will and negligent ignorance. My point is rather that it is extremely implausible that deception has never tricked at least some reasonable people into believing that an important political act is unjustified similar to how the Correctarian leaders have tricked Vicky. Nevertheless, the typical responses of public reason liberals to agent-type challenges cannot address the challenge posed by the Correctarian leaders. By intentionally creating a bad epistemic environment, the Correctarian leaders have caused Vicky to believe that no reasonable balance of public values supports the proposed legislation. Vicky is acting reasonably in forming this belief. Although she is disposed to cooperate on fair terms, she believes that the legislation is not fair. Vicky adheres to her own standards of reasoning in drawing this conclusion. A moderately idealized Vicky would not believe something different. She is also acting rationally in trusting her community to help her form her beliefs. In deferring to others, she did not alienate 61 herself from her reasoning capacities. She did her best to assess the evidence on her own and to consider arguments on both sides. Perhaps Vicky would have reached a different conclusion if she cared less about her family, job, and attachments to the Correctarian community and spent more time researching. But this version of Vicky would be radically different from her actual self. I have already said why radical idealization is not a convincing response to agent-type challenges. A public reason liberal might object that what matters for the legislation’s public justification is not whether people like Vicky now consider it justified or would consider it justified in an ideal state but instead whether they will eventually consider it justified. Vicky believes the legislation is unjustified only because the Correctarian leaders are preventing her from reasoning “under conditions favorable to due reflection” [Rawls 2005: 119]. Surely – one might say – the Correctarian leaders cannot maintain these bad epistemic conditions, and Vicky will change her mind. This claim is dubious. Neither endlessly re-examining our beliefs nor continually challenging others is always in our rational interest. At some point we simply have better things to do. In the case of Vicky, it is plausible that even if her conditions change to become favorable to due reflection, her beliefs about the legislation will persist. Its enactment could simply remain a contentious issue for her, a lamentable fact of life to which she begrudgingly resigns herself. Her friends who disagree have tried convincing her that she is mistaken. They will plausibly stop debating with her rather than risk their friendship by continually revisiting the issue. But more importantly, this objection fails because how long powerful deceivers can maintain a person in bad epistemic conditions shouldn’t matter for public justification. If it does, then the Correctarians could oblige the government to not enact the legislation by maintaining 62 Vicky in bad epistemic conditions long enough. This result is wrong. It is implausible that rules could become illegitimate simply by deceivers gaining enough power to trick people in the long run. Overall, the most obvious responses to cases like Vicky and the Correctarians come up short. Powerful deceivers pose a real challenge for Public Reason Liberalism. 4. Externalizing Public Reason Liberalism Avoiding this challenge requires further externalizing Public Reason Liberalism. This task demands caution. Introducing more externalist considerations risks confusion given Public Reason Liberalism’s current vocabulary. The notions of reasonableness, the Public Justification Principle, public justification, and the kinds of reasons associated with them need subtle yet significant revision. Consider Vicky. She is described as responding to her epistemic environment like a reasonable person. Public Reason Liberalism portrays reasonable people as within the justificatory constituency. But avoiding the challenge of powerful deceivers requires that some government actions are legitimate even though they are not justifiable to her. This suggests that she is not reasonable after all. We can clarify the situation with a distinction. Some public reason liberals already hold that reasonableness is a property with both internalist and externalist aspects. On the internalist side, reasonableness requires a disposition to respond rationally to internal facts. On the externalist side, reasonableness requires a commitment to particular values – for instance, an admissible conception of fair terms. Cases like Vicky and the Correctarians show that we must add a restricted epistemic externalism to this side: A person is fully reasonable only if 63 unreasonable people have not inappropriately caused her beliefs. It would therefore not inordinately stretch current use of the term to say that a person is internally reasonable just when she has all the internalist aspects of reasonableness and is externally reasonable just when she has all the externalist aspects of reasonableness. The legitimacy of a government’s act requires that it is justifiable only to persons who are both internally and externally reasonable in their relevant beliefs about that act. Acts of the government that the Correctarian leaders have caused Vicky to consider unjustified can nevertheless be legitimate because she is reasonable internally but not externally. I don’t expect this change to satisfy public reason liberals. That the law is legitimate suggests that it is publicly justified. But saying the law is publicly justified conflicts with the basic idea of public justification as motivating compliance with rules by making them acceptable to reasonable perspectives that may be objectively incorrect. Although Vicky’s perspective is mistaken, she holds it reasonably through doing her best to form her opinions and to cooperate on fair terms. She is motivated to comply with the law not because it is acceptable from her perspective but for other reasons, which may include fear of the consequences of non- compliance. Imposing the law on her consequently seems morally regrettable. And because the law is not adequately supported by facts internal to her perspective, all the grounds of public justification that allegedly explain this sense of regret are undermined. For these reasons, it seems that the law is not publicly justified to Vicky given how public reason liberals characterize this notion. Minimally revising public reason liberalism to avoid this problem requires preserving public justification’s close relation to both legitimacy and the basic idea of acceptability to 64 reasonably held perspectives that may be objectively incorrect. I suggest that this can be done by adopting the relationship model of public justification. 61 Let us continue to use ‘public justification’ to denote the public good consisting of the morally important relation that ought to hold between the government, the rules it imposes, and the public on which it imposes them. Like a relationship, its preservation requires both parties to do their part. To say a person is internally reasonable is to say that she is doing her part to preserve public justification. To say a government’s act satisfies what we are currently calling the Public Justification Principle is to say that the government is doing its part to preserve public justification. But as with many relationships, the preservation of public justification can be threatened even if both parties are doing their part. Just as a third party, by spreading rumors of infidelity or betrayal, can destroy a marriage or friendship between two persons who are doing their part to preserve these relationships, a third party can destroy the relation of public justification by similar means. I assume public reason liberals are correct that a rule is legitimate only if the government fulfills its duty to preserve their favored morally important ground while imposing it. I also assume public reason liberals are correct that these alleged grounds cannot be preserved without public justification and that this requires acceptability to internally reasonable perspectives. A rule is consequently legitimate only insofar as the government does its part to preserve the rule’s public justification. To better express these claims, let us rename the ‘Public Justification 61 My intention in calling this the relationship model is not to suggest that public justification is the relationship of civic friendship, about which I am agnostic. I am merely suggesting that we gain insight into public justification by thinking of it as like a relationship, even if – all things considered – it is not. 65 Principle’ the ‘Legitimacy-Justification Principle.’ On the view I am proposing, this principle is stated as follows: Legitimacy-Justification Principle. A rule imposed by the government is legitimate only if it is justifiable to every (moderately idealized) person who is both internally and externally reasonable on whom it is imposed. Returning to the case of Vicky, it is appropriate to say the legislation she is deceived into considering unjustified is nevertheless legitimacy-justified. The government has a duty (not merely pro tanto reason) to act in accordance with the legitimacy-justification principle. Since it has fulfilled this duty, the government acts permissibly in requiring Vicky to adhere to the legislation and in using some degree of coercion to force her compliance. 62 At the same time, it is also appropriate to say the legislation is not publicly justified to her. ‘Public justification’ now denotes the morally important relation consisting of the government’s act being justifiable to all persons as a result everyone’s cooperation, including third parties, to preserve the morally important grounds. So, the public reason liberal is absolutely right that it is regrettable to impose legislation on people like Vicky because of a failure of public justification. It is just that in such cases neither the government nor the internally reasonable public are responsible for this failure. It is rather powerful deceivers who cause Vicky to consider the legislation unjustified. 62 In other words, Vicky is not within the justificatory constituency of this legislation because she is deceived. Yet she is within the justificatory constituency of all other rules about which her beliefs are both internally and externally reasonable. 66 But what is the relation I now call public justification? This is still an open question. Because the government’s legislation is not publicly justified when imposed on someone like Vicky, public justification requires fulfilling an epistemically internalist condition. However, the challenge of powerful deceivers additionally shows that public justification also requires fulfilling an epistemically externalist condition. This reinforces the claim of the previous chapter that public justification must overall be a hybrid of both kinds of conditions, and failure of either one constitutes a regrettable loss of an important public good. 63 Gaussians should in particular find this result difficult to resist given their tendency to eschew ideal theory. Proponents of both the major versions of Public Reason Liberalism accordingly have overwhelming reason to adopt some version of my hybrid view. We can see this by considering further ways that powerful deceivers can trick people. We have so far considered just one: powerful deceivers can trick people into believing the government is not doing its part to preserve public justification even though it is. But deceivers can also trick people into believing the government is not doing its part when it is not doing its part, into believing it is doing its part when it is doing its part, or into believing the government is doing its part when it is not doing its part. The first two cases occur when an attempt to deceive steers people towards having correct beliefs. In this respect, they are similar to cases of ‘veridical hallucination’ in epistemology. Although these cases are theoretically interesting, I assume they are rare and not 63 I provide additional and independent reason to adopt this hybrid view in Donahue [2020]. That work is pitched at the level of ideal theory, however, and does not argue for the relationship model or revising the notions of reasonableness and the justificatory constituency. 67 worth investigating here. But cases in which powerful deceivers cause people to believe that the government is doing its part when it is not deserve further attention. 64 On the relationship model, public justification happens when the government and the public each do their part. So, if internally reasonable members of the public are tricked into believing the government is doing its part to publicly justify a rule when it is not, the relationship model entails that the rule is not publicly justified. This is what we should expect. That intentional deception might contribute to a rule’s legitimacy is just as absurd as that it might detract from it. Let’s see which alleged moral grounds for public justification are consistent with this result. Consider justice and respect: If a person is tricked into believing that the government is doing its part when it is not, then she will not in fact share a standpoint with the government from which she can view its actions as acceptable or see it as acting on reasons she can likewise endorse. Consider autonomy and co-authorship: Someone tricked might think the government is acting or involving her in projects on the basis of reasons she could will herself or endorse, but this not in fact the case. The reasons a deceived person thinks exist do not exist. So, public justification fails according to these grounds. Now consider stability, civic friendship, and social trust: Tricking persons to perceive political authority as acceptable seemingly improves each of these relations in some respect. Those deceived are less likely to object to the authority and more likely to trust and cooperate with it. Indeed, creating something like these goods is often a reason why deception is attempted. 64 Such cases plausibly arise – to give one example – when governments use propaganda to persuade the public to accept unjust military interventions. See Lewandowsky et al. [2013: 488-93]. 68 Considerations of accountability practices are also upheld. This is because deception can give a person sufficient reason to accept a rule that is reflectively accessible from her perspective. This division reveals a problem for these latter grounds, the last two of which are predominately favored by Gaussians. 65 Public justification fails regardless of whether powerful deceivers trick people into believing the government is not doing its part when it is or trick people into believing the government is doing its part when it is not. A ground that purports to explain why a failure of public justification is wrong should explain why it is wrong in either case. The grounds of justice, respect, autonomy, and co-authorship consequently seem to provide better explanations of the moral importance of public justification than stability, civic friendship, social trust, and considerations related to accountability practices. There is, however, a fairly obvious reply, one that proponents of stability may already have in mind. Public reason liberals often say that mere stability is not important for public justification but rather stability for the right reasons [Rawls 2005: 133-4; Quong 2011: 164]. The social relations between the government and a public deceived into believing that its acts are justified may be stable, but they will not be stable for the right reasons. Similarly, proponents of civic friendship and social trust could say that friendly or trusting relations between citizens and the government matter only when they exist for the right reasons, where what ‘right reasons’ are is incompatible with deception. 66 And those who appeal to accountability practices could say 65 See, for instance, Gaus (2011) and Vallier (2019). 66 Ebels-Duggan [2010: 55] seemingly presupposes a ‘right reasons proviso’ in requiring that the cooperation constitutive of civic friendship be free of manipulation. Leland and van Wietmarschen [2017: 159-160] require 69 that persons sometimes have sufficient reason to accept a rule even though they cannot access it through a reasonable amount of reflection and deliberation. Yet note where this reply leaves us. To avoid explanatory asymmetry, the right reasons in question must have an externalist character. Although people may be deceived into thinking the government is justified by acting for the right reasons, the public reason liberal must say it is not in fact justified. But the public reason liberal will then be using what Van Schoelandt [2015: 1033] has called an impersonal justification, one that “appeals to the true or genuine reasons that apply to the subjects” regardless of whether those subjects can be expected to recognize those reasons. This is a further way in which the challenge of powerful deceivers supports externalizing Public Reason Liberalism. It is also one that makes sense on the relationship model: Someone can turn out to not be your friend even though they seem to be. 5. Objections and Replies Perhaps some readers will acknowledge the challenge of powerful deceivers but consider the response of externalizing Public Reason Liberalism too drastic. When Public Reason Liberalism gained prominence after the publication of John Rawls’ Political Liberalism, what many considered the theory’s distinguishing feature was that it sought neutrality in its claims about contested philosophical views. Externalizing Public Reason Liberalism seemingly introduces contested views, in particular contested epistemological ones like process reliabilism. cooperation to be based on a shared view of what is beneficial. Because persons can share a view of what is beneficial for the wrong reasons, it is not obvious that they also endorse such a proviso. 70 Externalizing Public Reason Liberalism nevertheless does not require endorsing contested epistemological views. Public reason liberals can be neutral on whether an internally reasonable person who has been deceived into believing that a rule is justified is epistemically justified in holding this belief. She need only say that such a person’s belief is not justified in a way that contributes to the rule’s being publicly justified. She will thereby respond as public reason liberals typically do when they must use contested concepts such as ‘truth’, ‘respect’, and ‘justification’. This is to acknowledge that these concepts come with various conceptions but to bracket those that are not absolutely necessary for their theorizing. 67 People commonly acknowledge that our beliefs can be rational but mistaken because of external circumstances. A political philosophy unable to take such errors into account would be so restrictive that it could not say much of anything important. Alternatively, one might worry that externalizing Public Reason Liberalism removes any significant distinction between the theory and its competitors, in particular Comprehensive Perfectionism. As described in the Introduction, proponents of this kind of liberalism hold that a political philosophy ought to be based on a comprehensive conception of the good and that governments can legitimately impose rules that sufficiently promote this good, even if some people reasonably consider them unjustified [Quong 2011: 19-20]. An externalized Public Reason Liberalism does resemble Comprehensive Perfectionism in some respects. Rules can be legitimately imposed on some reasonable people to whom they are 67 Philosophers who make this move with respect to truth include Cohen [2009] and Quong [2011: ch. 10]. Larmore [2008: 149 fn. 20] says something similar about the concept of respect as does Vallier [2014: 104] concerning justification. 71 unjustified, namely deceived people who are merely internally reasonable. Public reason liberals also can no longer claim a lack of externalist considerations as a distinguishing feature of their theory. However, the significant similarities end there. An externalized Public Reason Liberalism does not collapse into Comprehensive Perfectionism. Although fully defending this claim requires another paper, the following sketch makes it at least plausible. The Legitimacy-Justification Principle allows imposing rules against the objections of reasonable people only when these objections are based on beliefs that have been inappropriately caused by powerful deception. It requires deference to the same objections when they are the outcome of the sincere attempt by reasonable people who have not been deceived to pursue their conception of the good, even if this is not the actual good. An externalized Public Reason Liberalism is therefore content-neutral to a greater degree than comprehensive perfectionism and still places a significant constraint on government action. This content-neutral distinction between objections is moreover defensible. In liberal societies, reasonable disagreement is a foreseeable consequence of the sincere attempt of people to form and pursue a conception of the good. The considerations that public reason liberals have offered convincingly explain why rules should not be imposed against disagreement that is both internally and externally reasonable. But powerful deception is not a foreseeable consequence of the sincere attempt to form and pursue a conception of the good. Powerful deceivers are culpable for their deception, having intentionally or negligently flouted public 72 norms of communication. 68 It is therefore appropriate to expect reasonable people to accept one standard of treatment for cases where they are deceived and another standard when they commit unforced error while sincerely pursuing the good. The terms of such treatment – the general criteria for deciding when deception inappropriately causes a belief, for instance – is up to reasonable people to freely choose among themselves. Overall, externalized Public Reason Liberalism forbids imposing rules merely because they are good; they must also be justifiable to all who are internally and externally reasonable. Finally, one might observe that I am not the only advocate of substantially revising the Public Justification Principle because of agent-type challenges. Chad Van Schoelandt [2015: 1042] 68 One might wonder if other varieties of deception are compatible with public justification. First, a person could paternalistically deceive others by manipulating them to hold beliefs that she sincerely thinks are correct. Second, a person could genealogically deceive others by herself being rationally deceived into holding a belief and then causing others to share it through sincere communication. Third, a person could accidentally influence others to hold beliefs for reasons they would reject. Since it is typically impractical to display all the reasons for our actions, a person could impose a rule on the basis of reasons she sincerely believes others could accept but that they actually would reject. I think that in each case compatibility with public justification depends on the public civic virtue of testifiers. Paternalistic deception is incompatible with public justification because it involves disrespecting the freedom public reason liberals think others have to form their own views. Genealogical deception is likewise incompatible with public justification so long as it is strongly based on the testimony of deceivers. Accidental deception (if I may call it that) is possible as an inadvertent side-effect of the sincere attempt to communicate about complex political issues. I therefore view it as compatible with public justification provided that the accidental deceiver communicates with appropriate public civic virtue. Defending these claims exceeds the scope of this paper, but I am developing them in work in progress. 73 argues that public reason liberals must respond to the challenge of principled illiberal dissenters by ceasing to view public justification as a necessary condition for legitimacy. His view is that public justification instead plays an essential role in treating people as free and equal co- members of a moral community. We disrespect others when we demand they adhere to moral rules that are not justifiable to their perspectives, where the relevant sense of ‘justification’ is internal [ibid.: 1042-3]. My view is distinct from Van Schoelandt’s in several important ways. It retains a connection between legitimacy and public justification in the face of agent-type challenges via the Legitimacy-Justification Principle. By contrast, Van Schoelandt [ibid.: 1042, 1045] advocates “downgrading” public justification to one moral good that must be weighed against others. My view also makes an externalist condition essential to public justification. A central motivation Van Schoelandt [ibid.: 1041] offers for his view is that it preserves a purely internalist conception of public justification. The challenge of powerful deceivers calls this motivation into question. Persons can also be deceived into believing that moral rules are justified when they in fact are not. 69 It is not clear whether Van Schoelandt would accept that deception contributes to the public justification of moral rules. If he does, this seems a large bullet to bite. But if he does not, it can only be because an external, impersonalist sense of justification is relevant to public justification, thereby undermining a central motivation for his view. 69 Deception of this kind often occurs when a potential change in social morality threatens the interests of some individuals. A case in point is the disinformation associated with changes in moral norms concerning homosexuality in the United States. For examples, see Schlatter and Steinbeck [2011]. 74 6. Conclusion It is understandable why public reason liberals would resist the idea of externalizing their theory. Public Reason Liberalism is presented as a philosophy that is compatible with toleration and respect of diverse perspectives even if they are objectively incorrect. To say a person’s objections to a rule can be dismissed because of how her belief was caused sounds as if she can be dismissed merely because she is wrong. However, the challenge of powerful deceivers shows that public reason liberals must take a more nuanced attitude towards externalist considerations. Thinking of public justification as a relationship suggests why there is still much to regret when someone’s objections are dismissed because of externalist considerations. The kinds of deception we see in contemporary democracies create a real failure of public justification. From this perspective, raising the specter of powerful deceivers does not merely force public reason liberals into making troublesome revisions to their theory. Rather, it suggests they have something distinctive to say about why deception is wrong: It undermines the morally important relation of public justification that public reason liberals have argued deserves preservation all along. 75 Chapter 3: A Defense of Blame from the Blue Although I expect proponents of both Rawlsian and Gausian versions of Public Reason Liberalism to resist externalizing public justification, I expect resistance from Gausians to be stronger. Gausians are suspicious that Rawlsians are already too close to endorsing an externalist theory on account of their penchant for ideal theory tests and appealing to notions of reasonableness that already include commitment to liberal values. 70 Explicitly embracing the addition of externalist elements to public justification and reasonableness will seem much worse. Considering that Rawlsians and Gausians are both Public Reason Liberals, an uncharitable explanation of this difference in attitude would be that Gausians think that Rawlsians simply misunderstand their own theory. I suggest that a more plausible explanation involves the foundational grounds on which each philosophical camp argues for a public justification requirement. For Rawlsians, the ground has traditionally been a concern for stability for the right reasons, respect for others as free and equal, and the preservation of justice. For Gausians, the ground has traditionally been the conditions under which the accountability practices of social morality are appropriately administered. 71 The accountability practices in question are those of blame and the attendant reactive attitudes of anger and resentment that we have toward those who violate social moral norms. 70 For instance, the broadly Gausian Chad van Schoelandt (2015: 1033, 1037-1038) accuses the broadly Rawlsian Jonathan Quong of endorsing a notion of reasonableness that entails commitment to an externalist notion of justification. 71 See the list of grounds in Chapter 2 above for references. This appeal to accountability practices is sometimes coupled with the notion that our authority to deploy these practices must be consistent with respecting others in their capacity “to interpret their own moral obligations for themselves”, for instance in Gaus (2011: 17). 76 These latter grounds involving accountability practices seem less compatible with externalism than the former. Ensuring that society is stable for the right reasons, respecting others, and securing justice does not at first blush strongly invite a commitment to a requirement of internalist justification – interpreting these terms in a new theoretical context (namely, as a response to the Problem of Reasonable Pluralism) is needed to get there. This is not the case for concerns about the accountability practices. If a person breaks a norm we know that she, through no fault of her own, can’t see reason to accept either in a particular instance or as a general guide to action, the appropriate response on our part is seemingly excuse rather than blame. To do otherwise appears – as we’ll see Gausians claiming in a moment – authoritarian. For Gausians, this moral case straightforwardly extends to the political one where the state reacts to lawbreaking by the use of coercive force. 72 Coercing a person to comply with law she can’t see reason to accept either in a particular instance or as a general restraint on her conduct seems likewise authoritarian. For this reason, I expect the Gausian to welcome laws not being publicly justified to reasonable but deceived persons like Vicky but to resist the notion that reasonable but deceived persons can be appropriately coerced by the state to comply with laws they can’t see reason to accept. The purpose of this chapter is to undermine the rationale for this response. I argue that under the right conditions persons can be blameworthy for performing actions they cannot see reason to avoid and so the Gausian is mistaken in drawing a hard line against externalism. This is not the result of a naïve error on the Gausian’s part, however: we must pass through some dense epistemic weeds to get there. At the same time, it is a conclusion based on considerations that 72 Vallier (2019: 139). 77 not only the Gausian should accept but also other moral theorists who have converged to very similar considerations. This chapter’s relevance accordingly extends beyond Public Reason Liberalism and political philosophy. 1. Preparatory Comments To work our way to these considerations, I’d like you to take a moment and think about all the ways we publicly use the notion of blameworthiness in day-to-day life. We expect each other to avoid acting in ways that are blameworthy. We expect each other to treat blameworthy people in a characteristic manner – such as by telling them off and ostracizing them – provided that we have the standing to do so. We expect blameworthy people to feel guilty about their actions and to make a sincere effort to overcome their faults. We expect others to give us adequate information about what kind of actions are blameworthy so that we can avoid becoming blameworthy ourselves. The list goes on. Blameworthiness is obviously central to our social practices of accountability. But if blameworthiness is like anything else of public use, then the roles it plays and the people for whom it plays them ought to constrain what it is. Call this the Normative Fit Hypothesis. We see this hypothesis at work all the time. The shape and position of a building’s entrance, for instance, ought to fit the people we expect to use it. The same goes for websites, tax forms, cars, school curricula, and so forth. Adhering to this hypothesis requires thinking that whatever we all use in day-to-day life ought to be arranged in a way that is fair and respectful for everyone. 78 Part of my argumentative strategy will be to use the Normative Fit Hypothesis to investigate the epistemic condition for blameworthiness. Some epistemic condition for blameworthiness obviously exists. Just look at core cases like the following: Mislabeled Pills. Aiyla’s father is very sick, and she wants to cure him out of sincere concern for his health. To do so, she must give him pills. Aiyla gets a bottle of pills labeled ‘Cure’ as a prescription from a reputable doctor. The pills are not cure but poison. The doctor carefully mislabeled them to trick Aiyla. She gives her father the pills as prescribed and he dies. Typically, it is morally wrong to kill people. Aiyla has killed her father. So Aiyla has arguably done something morally wrong. 73 Nevertheless, Aiyla is not blameworthy. This is because of her epistemic situation. Specifically, it is because she is unable to discriminate between cure and poison because of the doctor’s trickery. Cases like Mislabeled Pills show us that blameworthiness depends on a person’s epistemic situation without explaining why. One explanation consistent with the Normative Fit Hypothesis is that a person is blameworthy only for what is fair or respectful to expect her to avoid. What expectations are fair or respectful in turn depends on a person’s epistemic situation, such as what she knows or rationally believes, what credible authorities have told her, and what seems to her to be the case. In short, we can appeal to our judgments about fairness and respect – in some sense yet to be specified – to explain the contours of an epistemic condition for blameworthiness. 73 I do not offer this example as decisive evidence for blameless wrongdoing. The point illustrated is only that it is possible to blamelessly performing acts that get a negative moral assessment. 79 Proponents of this explanation from fairness and respect, as I will call it, have furthermore argued that it requires blameworthiness to be transparent in the following sense: If a person is blameworthy, then at some time she was in a position to be aware that she should have acted otherwise. 74 This thought is pre-theoretically appealing. Imagine a boss expecting an employee to sort red apples from green ones in spite of knowing that he is red-green colorblind and then punishing him if he gets it wrong. The employee can surely complain that this expectation is unfair and disrespectful because of his innately limited abilities. Morality likewise gives us a sorting task: We are expected to discriminate right acts from wrong ones and to pursue the former while avoiding the latter. But whatever morality is, fairness and respect seemingly require that it can’t be related to us like the boss to the colorblind employee. If a rational person is attentive and always strives to do what seems morally correct, then blame can never appropriately come unexpectedly – like a bolt from the blue, so to speak – from her perspective. 75 While I also find the explanation from fairness and respect plausible, I contend that it has been misunderstood. Examining a couple marginal cases of blameworthiness shows that removing all possibility of blame from the blue violates the Normative Fit Hypothesis. This is because we have innately limited abilities to discriminate the morally relevant features of our prospective acts. 76 Conceptions of blameworthiness that accommodate this limitation by 74 Philosophers I have in mind here include Glover (1970: 73), Rosen (2003: 82), Levy (2009: 739), Gaus (2011: 29- 30), van Schoelandt (2015: 1043-1045), Fitzpatrick (2017: 40), and Vallier (2019: 9, 70, 97), among others. 75 I assume that rational persons always act without akrasia. 76 Philosophers who made this observation include Gibbons (2013: 130-131), Srinivasan (2015a), Hughes (2018), and Lasonen-Aarnio (2019). They apply their considerations to the features determining moral wrongness and do 80 removing all possibility of blame from the blue turn out not to be fair and respectful. This is because they create a distribution of burdens that is unfair and disrespectful to expect people to accept in light of the centrality of blameworthiness to our social practices of accountability. Our judgments of these marginal cases do not threaten core ones like Mislabeled Pills. They nevertheless have significant consequences for what proponents of the explanation from fairness and respect should think about the epistemic conditions of blameworthiness. Reflection on these cases shows that they are committed to incorrect judgments about many non-marginal cases as well, such as ones commonly arising during contentious changes in a society’s moral norms. The explanation from fairness and respect does not exclude the possibility of blame from the blue but rather the opposite: given the right circumstances, persons can be blameworthy for doing what they rationally believe is right. 2. The Appeal of Excluding Blame from the Blue Before considering what proponents of the explanation from fairness and respect say, it is important to clarify a technical point. The transparency of blameworthiness does not entail that people who are blameworthy are always in a position to be aware that they are blameworthy. not explore the consequences of extending the same considerations to blameworthiness. For a different criticism of appeals to fairness and respect that does not leverage our inherent epistemic limitations, see Talbert (2013: 237-242). Whereas Talbert argues that proponents of this explanation go wrong in assuming that persons can be blameworthy only for what is fair to expect of them, I argue that they go wrong in their assumptions about which expectations are fair in the first place. 81 This is because a person’s blameworthiness for an act can originate in a moment prior to its performance. Suppose Aiyla’s cousin, Badala, also kills his father because he can’t tell the difference between poison and cure. Yet Badala made this mistake because he took a hallucinogen knowing both that it would impair his judgement and that he would have to discriminate between cure and poison under its influence. Badala would then be blameworthy for killing his father even though he could not tell he was doing so. This is because his blameworthiness traces back to what is called a benighting act. Badala’s benighting act is his taking a hallucinogenic drug while knowing he would perform a morally important task under its influence. Strictly speaking, it is benighting acts that are the origin of blameworthiness and that proponents of the explanation from fairness and respect say that persons can always see reason to avoid. 77 From now on, when I talk about acts for which persons become blameworthy, I mean benighting acts unless stated otherwise. What it takes for a person to see reason to avoid an act admits of various interpretations. Yet proponents of the explanation from fairness and respect uniformly claim that what a person can see reason to avoid is what she can be aware that she has reason to avoid by reflecting or deliberating from her perspective. 78 According to Neil Levy, it is unfair to expect persons to avoid performing acts they cannot rationally choose to avoid. And what persons can rationally choose depends on their internal reasons. As Levy says, “What we can do rationally is what we can do by 77 See Levy (2009: 731) and Vallier (2019: 101). 78 For more expressions of this thought see the references in Footnote 2. 82 means of a reasoning procedure, and our reasoning procedures can only operate on our actual representations.” 79 Gerald Gaus similarly claims that a person can see reason to do something only if it is adequately supported by reasons that she can become aware of through “a sound (and not too difficult) deliberative route.” 80 Blaming someone is fully appropriate, according to Gaus, only if she can see reason in this sense to avoid what she is blamed for. 81 Otherwise, our expectations disrespect her in terms of her ability to interpret what morality requires of her. 82 Attempts to blame her for failing to satisfy these expectations merely succeed in forcing her compliance through “browbeating”. 83 What Levy considers a capacity for rational choice and what Gaus considers a capacity for interpreting morality are both a capacity for detecting the morally relevant features of actions that a person stands to perform. Although some of the terms used here are highly ambiguous, both these philosophers (in addition to the others mentioned) hold that we disrespect or treat persons unfairly when what we expect of them is beyond their capacity to achieve other than through guess or accident in response to their internal representations. Blameworthiness is transparent by this argument. If a person is never in a position to be aware that she should have 79 Levy (2009: 739). 80 Gaus (2010: 184). 81 Gaus (2011: 30, 250-253). 82 Gaus (2011: 17). 83 Gaus (2010: 186-187; 2011: 30; 2014: 574). 83 acted otherwise, then at no point can she rationally follow a deliberative route to the conclusion that she should have acted otherwise. 3. The Basic Problem I argue that the above views are incompatible with the Normative Fit Hypothesis. We can begin to see this by considering the question: What expectations do people fail to meet when we consider them blameworthy? What we expect of others is shown by what it’s possible to say to communicate our expectations to them. In this regard, it is not fully adequate to say that we expect people to avoid doing wrong things. For if we blame a person for failing to fulfill this expectation, she can justly raise complaints like the following: ‘Aiyla also did something wrong – she killed her innocent father – and yet you didn’t consider her blameworthy. Why do you expect something different of her than me?’ To the proponent of the explanation from fairness and respect, such complaints reveal that what was said was only partially true. When we properly consider a person blameworthy for something, what we (strictly speaking) expect of her is not just to avoid doing something wrong. What we expect a person to avoid – what we would say that she is blameworthy for – is instead being in the condition of doing something wrong while seeing that it is wrong, however one interprets this phrase. Here is where problems for proponents of the explanation from fairness and respect start. We cannot expect persons to avoid blameworthy acts without expecting them to avoid acting in a way that fulfils a sufficient condition for blameworthiness. Since there is some sufficient condition for blameworthiness, we can ask the proponent to state what one is. Suppose the 84 description she offers is, ‘Persons are blameworthy when they do something motivated by ill-will while being insufficiently confident that they are not doing something motivated by ill-will.’ 84 To expect someone to avoid blameworthy acts would then be to expect her to avoid performing an act motivated by ill-will while being insufficiently confident that she is not motivated by ill-will. Persons need not avoid blameworthiness by using some cognitively demanding process, such as explicitly categorizing the acts they stand to perform as those that do and those that do not satisfy this description, then avoiding the former. But proponents of the explanation from fairness and respect must accept that persons at least have the capacity to be sensitive to the morally relevant features of their situation in a way that enables them to avoid satisfying this description. This places the claims of those who support this explanation in conflict with the observation that all persons have innately limited abilities to track the morally relevant features of their situation. 85 I am using ‘situation’ in a broad sense: It includes everything epistemically internal to a person, the way things appear to her, what she knows and believes, her levels of confidence, and so forth. An outcome of having this innately limited ability is that for any given person and feature, one can always find a pair of similar but non-identical cases that she is liable 84 This proposed sufficient condition for blameworthiness is intended merely to provide a plausible illustration. As will be clear later, no other condition avoids the problem I present. I claim neither that this sufficient condition is ultimately correct nor that it is one proponents of the explanation from fairness would all endorse. 85 The consideration in question underlies Timothy Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument. See Williamson (2000: 13) and Srinivasan (2015b: 306-308). I am not particularly concerned here with the conclusion of this argument, namely that there are no non-trivial conditions we know we are in whenever we are in them. 85 to confront such that one of these cases has this feature, the other lacks it, and she cannot discriminate between these cases. Call this the limited discriminatory abilities claim. This claim is highly plausible. Cases can surely differ in what features they have in spite of otherwise being very similar. But given our physical constitution, we cannot always tell that distinct cases are distinct. I find this claim about our physical constitution convincing in itself. 86 Others have argued that it is further supported by reflection on the nature of our dispositions. When we respond to something in a case, such by forming a belief or performing an act, in very similar but distinct cases we are disposed to produce the same response. 87 This is also true of our responses that depend on our degrees of confidence, even under the unrealistic assumption that they are perfectly calibrated to our evidence. It is implausible that our dispositions to respond perfectly align with the degrees of belief under which they are appropriate. 88 This further supports the claim because if a person can discriminate between distinct cases, then she must be disposed to respond to them differentially. The sufficient conditions for blameworthiness are no exception to the limited discriminatory abilities claim. The result is that in at least some cases where a person lacks the ability to discriminate between the morally relevant features of the acts she stands to perform, she lacks the capacity to avoid those acts because they have those features. As a result, a person can sometimes act from a failure to see that she is about to fulfil the proposed sufficient condition 86 See Srinivasan (2015b: 306-307) for an account of why some have thought that this claim about our physical constitution needs no further defense. 87 Srinivasan (2015b: 303). 88 Srinivasan (2015b: 313-314). 86 of blameworthiness in the same way that she can sometimes act from a failure to see that she is about to do something morally wrong. Marginal cases of blameworthiness illustrate this problem. Suppose we continue with the proposal that a sufficient condition for blameworthiness is doing something motivated by ill-will while being insufficiently confident that one is not doing something motivated by ill-will. Then consider the following: 89 Long Explanation. Tala and Julia just became acquainted at a business conference. Both of them are on equal social footing and started their conversation with a sincere interest in mutually exchanging helpful information. Tala asks Julia a question about a topic that has been puzzling her. Julia is especially knowledgeable about the topic and starts answering with the belief that she is trying to be helpful. She is in fact motivated by a desire to show off. Although she does not believe this at first, she becomes increasingly confident of her true motives the longer she spends answering Tala’s question. Assume that in the given context, Julia becomes insufficiently confident that she is not motivated by a desire to show off when her confidence in this proposition falls below 80%. Suppose that at one minute into giving her answer, her confidence in this proposition is at 79%. Julia’s innate abilities are such that she cannot discriminate between when her confidence level is 80% instead of 79%. 89 This example is loosely inspired by Srinivasan (2015b: 312-314). For additional cases where limited discriminatory abilities cause difficulties for moral assessments, see Hughes (2018: 447-449) and Lasonen-Aarnio (2019: 177-178). 87 Julia just barely satisfies the proposed sufficient condition for blameworthiness. In a very similar case – the one in which her confidence is at 80% – Julia is at most risking blameworthiness in continuing her already long answer to Tala. To avoid a vicious regress, however, we must admit that one can risk blameworthiness without being blameworthy. 90 Overall, Julia satisfies the proposed sufficient condition for blameworthiness at one minute into her answer. Julia is therefore blameworthy for showing off at that point. But this conflicts with the claims of proponents of the explanation from fairness and respect. According to them, our expectations that a person avoid something are fair and respectful only if she can see reason to fulfil them. What we expect Julia to avoid is not just doing something motivated by ill-will but rather doing something motivated by ill-will while being insufficiently confident that she is not doing something motivated by ill-will. Yet Julia cannot do this at one minute into her response: she lacks the capacity to fulfil our expectations because she cannot discriminate a case in which she is fulfilling them from one in which she is not. For all she knows at that point, she is merely risking blameworthiness and is in fact being helpful. The limitations of her abilities are 90 Insisting on the opposite commits one to a view that generates blameworthiness too easily. You are not blameworthy now only if there is no true moral theory according to which your present choice of action is blameworthy. The latter claim is open to at least some doubt: Just think of the many things you do for which at least some people would sincerely consider you blameworthy. Since you cannot be fully certain that there is no true moral theory according to which you are now blameworthy, you must admit some present risk of blameworthiness. But if the principle in question is correct, you are then actually blameworthy. Risking blameworthiness makes one blameworthy only if the risk is substantial. 88 innate and not caused by prior negligence. So, our expectations of her are not fair and respectful, and she is not blameworthy for failing to fulfil them, contrary to supposition. Perhaps one thinks cases where the sufficient conditions for blameworthiness come with a sharp cutoff are unrealistic. Although I reply to this worry below, considerations of our limited discriminatory abilities are flexible enough to avoid it. Let us continue to suppose that a sufficient condition for blameworthiness is doing something motivated by ill-will while being insufficiently confident that one is not doing something motivated by ill-will. Then consider the following case: Ballet Bully. Elvira is a ballet instructor who prides herself on demanding a lot from her pupils. She often justifies her being demanding as ‘strict teaching’ that is necessary to enable her pupils to succeed. Because she is open about her approach, she says that her students know what they sign up for when they join her class. Nevertheless, Elvira knows that strict teaching and bullying are different and that bullying is wrong. Suppose that she is preparing her pupils for a performance by commanding them to perform repetitions of a physically demanding movement by shouting ‘again!’ many times. She is in fact motivated by a bullying impulse throughout. She starts being highly confident that she is merely being a strict teacher but steadily becomes less confident that she is not bullying. As she considers whether to continue shouting ‘again!’, she reflects on her growing lack of confidence in the moral purity of her motivation. She correctly observes that her case is qualitatively indistinguishable from one in which this lack of confidence is an expression of a morally unacceptable softness towards her pupils that threatens to deprive them of the strict teaching they need and expect. Having this thought motivates her to continue shouting ‘again!’ past where she becomes insufficiently confident that she is not bullying. 89 Since Elvira does something morally wrong while being insufficiently confident that she is not doing something morally wrong, she satisfies the proposed sufficient condition for blameworthiness. But her case is very similar to one in which this insufficient confidence is misplaced. She accordingly cannot discriminate her situation from one in which she does not satisfy this condition. This is due to her innately limited ability to correctly interpret the moral quality of her actions. In more general terms, the Basic Problem for the proponent of the explanation from fairness and respect is that for any person S, S is liable to stand to be in one of a pair of similar cases between which S cannot discriminate because of S’s innately limited abilities, one in which whatever description is proposed to denote a sufficient condition for blameworthiness is satisfied and the other in which it is not. Then suppose that S confronts a pair of such cases and happens to act in a way that satisfies the description. S is accordingly blameworthy. Proponents of the explanation from fairness and respect seemingly must reject this result. It is unfair and disrespectful to expect someone to avoid being in a condition when she cannot discriminate whether she stands to be in that condition because of the innate limitations of her capacity to detect and respond to moral reasons. But if the proponent of the explanation from fairness and respect rejects that S is blameworthy, then she must also reject her claim to have described a sufficient condition for blameworthiness in the first place. 4. Responses to the Basic Problem There are three options for responding to the Basic Problem. First, one could deny the limited discriminatory abilities claim. Second, one could revise the description purporting to denote a 90 sufficient condition for blameworthiness. Third, one could deny that it is unfair and disrespectful to expect someone to avoid being in a condition when she cannot discriminate whether she stands to be in that condition on account of the innate limitations of her abilities. While the proponent of the explanation from fairness and respect will try one of the first two options, I argue that the third must be embraced. The limited discriminatory abilities claim is accepted by a substantial number of philosophers. 91 Furthermore, it is not a merely theoretical conjecture. Empirical considerations strongly suggest that we cannot always discriminate what internal states we are in. 92 The limited discriminatory abilities claim is also general. Features of our situation for which the claim is plausibly true include not only typical phenomenological experiences, such as whether one is cold or in pain, but also our propositional attitudes, such as what we know or believe, as well as what seems to be the case. 93 What one in fact wills or intends is also not something we can always discriminate. 94 Long Explanation might make it seem that these considerations objectionably depend on vagueness. However, this worry cannot motivate rejecting the limited discriminatory abilities 91 Philosophers additional to those mentioned include Hawthorne and Stanley (2008: 586), Schwitzgebel (2008), and Weatherson (2019: 37), to name a few. 92 See, for example, Carruthers (2011), especially Chapter 12, and Schwitzgebel (2008). I owe my initial acquaintance with these references to Srinivasan (2015a: 275), who adds additional introspective evidence for our limited discriminatory capacities. 93 Lasonen-Aarnio (2019: 180). 94 Carruthers (2011: 342-343). 91 claim. Even if there were no vagueness and the extension of all terms had sharp cutoffs, our limited discriminatory abilities would remain. 95 The challenge for the proponent of the explanation from fairness and respect is rather to explain why our limited discriminatory abilities do not give rise to the Basic Problem. Noting that ‘blameworthiness’ is a vague predicate does not help. Suppose Long Explanation is an example where a person cannot discriminate between whether the act she is about to perform is not blameworthy or merely borderline blameworthy. We then still have the question: Is it fair and respectful to expect the person to avoid the borderline blameworthy act when she cannot discriminate that it is such? If ‘No’, then by the proponent’s lights this speaks against the action ever being blameworthy, even in borderline cases, contrary to stipulation. If ‘Yes’, then this speaks against assuming a tight connection between fairness and respect and what a person can see reason to avoid. Since the person cannot discriminate whether the act is borderline blameworthy, she cannot see reason to avoid it in the sense that the proponent of the appeal to moral expectations intends. The proponent of the explanation from fairness and respect might alternatively respond to the Basic Problem by revising the description she offered of a sufficient condition for blameworthiness. The point of revision is to avoid the counterexamples that the limited discriminatory abilities claim generates. These revisions can be either simple or complex. No simple revision will work, however. This is because the limited discriminatory abilities claim is general. Consider again the proposal that persons are blameworthy for doing something motivated by ill-will while being insufficiently confident that they are not doing something 95 Williamson (2000: 103-104). 92 motivated by an ill-will. Given that one can stand to be in this condition but not discriminate whether this is the case, a simple and initially plausible revision is that persons are blameworthy for doing something motivated by ill-will while both being insufficiently confident that they are not doing something motivated by ill-will and being able to discriminate whether they are insufficiently confident that they are not doing something motivated by ill-will. This revised proposal may avoid the original counterexample, but it is susceptible to the same problem. People are liable to encounter cases that differ in whether they satisfy this more elaborate condition but without being able to discriminate between these cases. After all, if there is one thing that we surely have limited ability to discriminate, it is whether we are at the limits of our own discriminatory abilities. Julia in Long Explanation, for instance, might be able to discriminate between how confident she is that she is not motivated by ill-will at a minute and a minute and ten seconds into her explanation but not be able to know that she can make this discrimination. The last resort of the proponent of the explanation from fairness and respect is to opt for a complex revision. Our consideration of simple revisions shows that the only way for complex ones to avoid counterexample is by making blameworthiness a property that is finely-tuned on a case-by-case basis to a person’s innate discriminatory abilities. No finite description could exhaustively capture this condition. Someone who endorses this response can at most say something along the following lines: ‘Persons can act wrongly without being blameworthy because they act without being able to see that they are doing something wrong, or without being able to see that they know that they are doing something wrong, or without being able to 93 see that they know that they know that they know that they are doing something wrong, and so forth, as highly contextual features of their situation dictates.’ 96 Even though adopting a fine-tuned conception of blameworthiness avoids the counterexamples we have discussed so far, this reply ultimately fails. This is because a fine-tuned conception of blameworthiness conflicts with the Normative Fit Hypothesis. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, blameworthiness is essential to various moral tasks constituting our social practices of accountability. What conception of blameworthiness we adopt consequently produces an allocation of relevant burdens when we use that conception in these social practices. The expectations associated with a conception of blameworthiness are fair and respectful only if the resulting allocation of relevant burdens is fair and respectful to expect persons to accept. A fine-tuned conception of blameworthiness does not meet this requirement. 97 This is apparent through considering the relevant burdens in question. Relevant burdens are not an aggregate of negative consequences. They instead directly result from adopting a conception of blameworthiness because of the innately limited sensitivity to moral reasons of those who are expected to use that conception. So far, the only burden that proponents of arguments from moral expectations have considered is that of what we may call hypological luck. 98 Hypological luck occurs when one becomes blameworthy for happening to perform an act that one cannot see reason to avoid. Fine-tuning blameworthiness eliminates this burden 96 I take Levy (2011: 116) to endorses such a response. 97 For a related account of how different norms change the distribution of burdens produced by social practices related to self-defense, see Bolinger (2017: 211-214). 98 The term ‘hypological’ is from Srinivasan (2015a: 278). 94 entirely. But there are at least five other major burdens we should consider. First, there are false positives, instances where others consider one blameworthy when one is not. Second, there are false negatives, instances where others consider one not blameworthy when one is. Third, and derivative from these, there is the burden of accountability disputes, conflicts that arise when there is rational disagreement over whether a person is blameworthy. Other burdens arise because persons must be told something about blameworthiness if the social practice of accountability is to exist at all. These are, fourth, false self-reproach, instances where one considers oneself blameworthy when one is not. And fifth, the creation of a moral hierarchy between those who know important truths about blameworthiness and those who are ignorant of them. Common sense and empirical observations both suggest that as a conception becomes more complex, the task of correctly judging whether it applies to oneself or others more often results in error. 99 An increasingly fine-tuned conception of blameworthiness is increasingly complex. Fine-tuning consequently decreases instances of hypological luck at the cost of increasing instances of false positives, false negatives, accountability disputes, and false self- reproach. 100 For instance, it is easier to determine if a person (perhaps oneself) acted from an ill- will while being insufficiently confident that she acted from an ill-will, than it is to determine if she acted from an ill-will while knowing that she was insufficiently confident that she acted from 99 For empirical support, see Liu and Li (2011: 195) and Podofillini et al. (2013: 162). 100 Relevant increases in these burdens resulting from mere redefinition are properly discounted. Relevant increases instead involve cases of miscategorization that result from using a fine-tuned conception that would not be categorized as blameworthy under a non-fine-tuned conception. 95 an ill-will. It is furthermore infeasible for large numbers of people to master using complicated conceptions that result from a fine-tuning approach. Many persons will have to be told a simplified approximation. This would produce the kind of moral hierarchy among people that some proponents of the explanation from fairness and respect consider unacceptable. 101 Hypological luck is bad. But it is not plausibly so bad that it is fair and respectful to expect people to accept the allocation of burdens that result from accepting a fine-tuned conception of blameworthiness that is necessary for its elimination. 102 Participants in a social practice of accountability employing this conception not only would still be liable to having themselves or others think that they are blameworthy when they are not. Such misjudgments of blameworthiness – and the disputes they engender – would also be more numerous than in a social practice employing a simpler conception of blameworthiness that allowed for at least some instances of hypological luck. The final response to the basic problem is to deny that it is unfair and disrespectful to expect someone to perform a task in a case where she cannot discriminate whether she is performing it because of her innately limited abilities. It is understandable why proponents of the explanation from fairness and respect would initially reject this option. Becoming 101 Gaus seems especially averse to this possibility, given that he both considers morality to not be an expert discipline (2011: 254-257; 2014: 576-577) and is critical of theories such as act utilitarianism on account of their leading to significant divisions in moral expertise. (2010: 190-191) 102 In addition, that morality can sometimes shoulder us with significant burdens though luck is generally accepted. Many believe that we have duties to rescue that sometimes require us to incur personal costs to aid others as a result of our involvement in unforeseeable circumstances. 96 blameworthy though choosing an act that one cannot see reason to avoid is burdensome and does have weight in considerations of fairness and respect. Nevertheless, whether the expectations that result from a conception of blameworthiness are fair or respectful should be judged by considering the total burdens that result from adopting that conception in our practices of moral accountability. Conceptions of blameworthiness compatible with fairness and respect are plausibly those that generate expectations that eliminate many – but not all – instances of hypological luck. Expecting someone to perform a task even if she cannot discriminate whether she is performing it is fair and respectful when establishing expectations otherwise by adopting a different conception of blameworthiness would subject her to a worse distribution of burdens. Embracing this third option does not mean that blameworthiness lacks an epistemic condition. Core cases like Mislabeled Pills show this to be incorrect. But whatever the actual epistemic condition is, the considerations of this section reveal that it must allow for the possibility of persons being appropriately blamed from the blue. 5. Community Proponents of the explanation from fairness and respect might object that the Basic Problem corners them into accepting the possibility of blame from the blue only in an uninteresting sense. Marginal cases like Long Explanation and Ballet Bully seem rare. Furthermore, they involve persons who just barely become blameworthy or have strong reason to suspect that they are blameworthy. For all I’ve said, appropriately receiving blame from the blue might still be 97 impossible in that persons who become blameworthy are never rationally surprised to learn this about themselves. I contend, however, that blameworthiness and rational surprise are compatible. Some persons might even rationally believe they are acting as morality requires in doing what makes them blameworthy. Such cases are not rare but can be expected to happen whenever there are controversial changes in the moral norms that a society accepts. We already saw that judgments of blameworthiness are moral tasks that are both self- and other- directed. There are more ways that morality is a communal affair. Moral tasks include discovering new moral norms and revising existing ones in light of new information. These tasks ought to be performed with others because they are difficult. Everyone will do better at fulfilling moral requirements if they coordinate on and adhere to policies for how to perform these tasks compared to if each does so by following her own judgement alone. These policies ought to cover not only how to discover and revise such norms but also how to respond to the foreseeable problems that occur in attempting to do so. One foreseeable problem is thorough moral deception. Moral deception happens when one person deceives another into having incorrect beliefs about what morality requires, whether in a particular situation or in general. Moral deception is thorough when its target cannot be easily disabused of her ignorance by reasoning with others. Thorough moral deception is accordingly analogous to the political case discussed in the previous chapter. To see how such deception can happen in the moral realm, consider the following case: Communal Deception. Suppose that the Omnis are a community of people distributed across a very large area. Although they are divided into various sub-groups, the Omnis 98 share the same general culture and moral outlook. They widely agree about what moral norms to adhere to and about rules for their revision. At one point, the Omnis considered it morally required to not let women talk about political matters. Although the Omnis ought to have permitted women to participate in politics to the same extent as men, the male Omnis leaders sustained the widespread belief that this was wrong and vigorously countered any dissent. Nevertheless, Omnis moral reformers challenged this consensus according to the accepted rules and over a short period of time caused a wide consensus to form that it was permissible for women to talk about political matters. Leaders of one of the sub-groups, the Resistarians, resisted this change to further their own personal interest. They spread credible misinformation that moral reformers were using unsound arguments and had bad characters. Because many Resistarians were geographically isolated, had differences in education from other Omnis, and were subject to similar factors beyond their control, it was difficult for them to be exposed to alternative information. As a result, many of them were convinced that other Omnis had wrongly accepted the normative change. One typical Resistarian, Victor, consequently rationally believed that it was still morally required to not let women speak about political matters. An essential aspect of his motivation for holding this opinion was that he egotistically considered himself superior to the women in reasoning about politics. Yet he was prevented from recognizing this because of his upbringing and the information he received from his group leaders. 99 One day, he visited a neighboring group, saw women talking about politics, and attempted to stop them. The women then tried convincing him that what he was doing was wrong. They quickly realized that the only evidence they could provide was already discredited by the Resistarian group leaders and that it would take Victor an unreasonable amount of reflection to change his mind. Meanwhile Victor sincerely considered the women the ones thoroughly deceived. As the women once more began to talk about politics, Victor persisted in trying to stop them, motivated by his sense of superiority and moral rightness. Physically restraining Victor would risk inciting violence. At the same time, the women strongly (and correctly) believed on the basis of similar experiences that Victor would stop accosting them if they blamed him. The above scenario describes an instance where some individuals fail to accept a proper revision of moral norms because of thorough deception. Although this case is stylized for the sake of argument, this is a problem that often arises when norm revision threatens the interests of people who have the means to deceive others into believing that the revision is wrong. What policy should the Omnis adopt about how to treat someone like Victor? Quality of will and consequentialist theories of blame may be incorrect, but I have nevertheless described this case to be consistent with them so that subjecting Victor to hypological luck is the only major factor that speaks against blaming him. Even so, a policy on which Victor is not considered blameworthy for his actions would create a distribution of burdens that is unfair and disrespectful to expect the Omnis to accept, thereby violating the Normative Fit Hypothesis. It is obviously burdensome for the women. Such a policy would also be burdensome for Victor. People have an 100 interest in not committing wrongs even if they are not aware they are committing them. 103 A policy according to which Victor is not blamed and unknowingly performs multiple wrongs of a given type is more burdensome than one on which he is blamed once for something he could not see reason to avoid but consequently performs no more wrongs of that type. Victor furthermore has an interest in not being subjected to wrong acts by thoroughly deceived persons. It would be burdensome for him were he to find himself in a position similar to the women he prevents from speaking but not be able to properly blame those who are mistreating him. Given the distribution of burdens just described, policies consistent with fairness and respect are ones according to which the Omnis can expect persons like Victor to not violate the norm. The best such policy available would make Victor blameworthy for the norm violations. We can even imagine Victor explicitly consenting to adopt such a policy in the past, even though he would be surprised to learn it applies to him in the present. Communal Deception is accordingly an example in which it is consistent with fairness and respect for a person to become blameworthy for an act, even though that person would be rationally surprised to learn this about himself. Now is a good time to take a moment to reflect on what this conclusion about Victor the Resistarian tells us about the likely Gausian response to Vicky the Correctarian. We can start by noting that the basic Gausain ground for adopting public justification as a merely internalist requirement is undermined. Victor’s situation exemplifies that persons can deserve the reactions 103 Tadros, for instance, offers robust evidence that people strongly disvalue being responsible for wrongdoing even if everyone (including themselves) falsely believes they are innocent. (2020: 230-234) 101 of anger and resentment that come with blame in response to actions they cannot see reason to avoid. This failure to uphold strict internalism in the moral case should make us doubt that the Gausian can appeal to considerations about the reactive attitudes to argue for strict internalism in the political one. In addition, the view I’ve presented above explains why. Demanding strict internalism in the moral case creates a distribution of benefits and burdens that is unfair and disrespectful to expect people to accept given their rational capacities for making judgements. This applies to the political case as well. It would be unfair and disrespectful to expect the government and other reasonable people to endure the burdens of not imposing a law or to endure the burdens of discovering and accommodating people like Vicky who are reasonable but deceived, just because it is beyond their capacity to judge them acceptable. It seems much more fair and respectful, by contrast, to do such things for people who are both subjectively and objectively reasonable in considering a law unacceptable. So, the Gausian should allow imposing laws on people like Vicky and using some measure of coercion to force their compliance if necessary. If someone like Vicky resists, she is not necessarily blameworthy. But she can be insofar as her resistance is motivated by some kind of ill-will. Which kinds of ill-will matter here plausibly correlate to a public conception of virtue and vice – on which I will say more in the next chapter. 6. Objections and Replies In the meantime, let’s return to Victor. Victor is much more ignorant of the moral quality of his actions than Elvira from Ballet Bully and Julia from Long Explanation. The principle by which it is plausible that all these persons are blameworthy is nevertheless the same. The balance of 102 burdens in the moral practices involving judgments of blameworthiness make it fair and respectful to sometimes expect them to avoid acts they cannot see reason to avoid. Proponents of the explanation from fairness and respect may nevertheless still claim that Victor is not blameworthy. The Omnis know from talking with him that Victor sincerely and rationally believes he is morally required to do what in fact amounts to violating the norm. One might accordingly say that the Omnis can at most see themselves as browbeating Victor into not doing what he rationally believes morality requires of him. Browbeating is typically morally wrong, but in this case, it is the best available option in an already unfortunate situation. 104 However, it is no longer clear why Victor’s particular epistemic situation makes a difference to whether he is blameworthy or merely the unfortunate recipient of browbeating. The reason formerly given – that it would be unfair and disrespectful to expect him to avoid what he cannot see reason to avoid – no longer applies. The distribution of relevant burdens that result from a conception of blameworthiness that classifies Victor as blameworthy are fair and respectful to expect Victor and other members of his moral community to accept. In considering Victor blameworthy, they are not acting as authoritarians, trying to unilaterality impose rules to benefit themselves as the expense of others. They are instead trying to create a distribution of burdens that is more equitable for everyone. Perhaps one alternatively objects that classifying Victor as blameworthy violates the principle ‘ought implies can’. Since Victor rationally believes both that he does not act from an ill-will and that he is morally required to prevent the women from talking, he cannot have 104 Van Schoelandt (2015: 1044-1045) and Gaus (2014: 574). 103 rationally acted otherwise. There is accordingly a version of this principle that conflicts with the expectation that Victor behave differently. This objection is also lacking. We have not been given reason to think that this version of the principle is correct. The ‘ought implies can’ principle is after all notoriously difficult to state adequately. 105 In the present case, there is an alternative sense in which Victor can do what he ought. Victor has a general capacity to conform to moral requirements. It’s just that his epistemic limitations hinder his responsiveness to what morality requires in this particular situation. This allows for a wider sense in which considering Victor blameworthy is compatible with his rationality. One benefit of entering a moral community is that other members can help us better conform with moral requirements than we could by using our reason alone. Given that Victor has a general interest in morality as a member of a moral community, it is rational for him to consent to be held accountable for an act he cannot see reason to avoid in this particular case. There remains another way to relate Victor’s rationality to his blameworthiness. One could claim that if Victor is blameworthy for breaking a norm, then having reactive attitudes towards him such as anger, indignation, and resentment must be apt. But, as a matter of conceptual necessity, the aptness of these attitudes requires one to believe that Victor could have rationally avoided breaking the norm. Since this condition is not met, Victor is not blameworthy. 106 105 For a more in-depth articulation of this concern in the context of anti-luminosity considerations, see Hughes (2018). 106 For an expression of this argument, see Gaus (1990: 283-285). 104 This argument’s weak point is the premise that resentment and indignation are apt only for what persons could rationally do otherwise. The intuition supporting this claim is not robust. As various philosophers observe, we routinely consider persons blameworthy for so-called slips. 107 Slips are fluke instances of forgetting, failing to notice details, or lapses in attention that it is not under a person’s control to avoid and that lead to morally bad consequences. Accordingly, it is not proper to say that a person could have rationally avoided a slip. Proponents of the explanation from fairness and respect might try to explain why judgments about slips are systematically wrong. 108 But the same can be done for their own judgments. In typical distributions of burdens, persons are not blameworthy for what they cannot rationally do otherwise. Through overlooking atypical distributions like the one described in Communal Deception, one can easily overgeneralize. Admittedly, some details of Communal Deception seemingly favor the present objection. Once we look past relevant facts about distributions of burdens and focus on how things appear from Victor’s perspective, there is a tendency to feel a degree of sympathy that tempers our anger. However, this observation does not provide strong evidence that persons are blameworthy only for what they can rationally avoid because we have this tendency can be explained in responding to one final objection. This is to argue that Victor is not blameworthy for his behavior because he has a very good excuse. One could say that ignorance excuses when one is not blameworthy for one’s 107 See, for instance, Sher (2009: 24), Amaya and Doris (2015: 255-256), and McGeer and Pettit (2015: 165). 108 For such an explanation, see Levy (2017). 105 ignorance. 109 Victor is blameworthy neither for his ignorance that he is violating a norm, nor for his ignorance that his motivations are morally wrong. Therefore, although he does something wrong, he is not blameworthy. This objection presupposes that excuses always defeat blameworthiness. But considerations we have already made show that this is not the case. Excuses always defeat blameworthiness only if the following principle is true: Blameworthiness-Excuse. A person is blameworthy for an act only if she does not have an excuse for performing the act. If Victor’s ignorance gives him an excuse for performing his act, then the ignorance of persons such as Julia in Long Explanation and Elvira in Ballet Bully likewise excuse them for performing the acts for which it was claimed they were blameworthy. But then the principle Blameworthiness-Excuse becomes entangled in the Basic Problem facing proponents of the explanation from fairness and respect. If one accepts this principle, one must either reject the limited discriminatory abilities claim or reject the presupposition that the sufficient condition for blameworthiness is satisfied in those cases. We already saw why neither of those options were desirable. Since ignorance plausibly does excuse in some sense, it consequently must be the principle Blameworthiness-Excuse that should be rejected. This result is plausible. It is commonly recognized that while excuses can defeat blameworthiness, they can also merely mitigate it. 110 Erin Kelly, for instance, has recently argued that the latter occurs when our normally reasonable expectations that a person conform to moral 109 See Rosen (2003: 82), Van Schoelandt (2015: 1044-1045), and Vallier (2019: 101). 110 See McGeer and Pettit (2015: 161) and Kelly (2012: 248). 106 requirements is undermined to some extent by recognition of the obstacles she faces towards doing so that are beyond her control. This recognition is produced by our sensitivity to the fairness of the burden of meeting deontological moral demands. 111 As she puts it, “Our sense that a particular person is unfairly burdened by contingences the rest of us rarely encounter triggers a judgment that compassion is appropriate and that the circumstances that call for our compassion temper a person’s worthiness of blame.” 112 Kelly’s account explains our judgments concerning Victor. Victor breaks a moral norm. Given that his act is motivated by ill-will and considering the total distribution of burdens created by policies that do not permit the Omnis to blame him, it is fair and respectful to expect him to act otherwise and to consider him blameworthy if he does not. Becoming blameworthy nevertheless remains a significant burden, one that it is out of Victor’s control to avoid insofar as he is the victim of a bad epistemic environment sustained by the Resistarian group leaders and his innately limited capacities. We can nevertheless to some extent control how large his burden is by moderating our judgment of his blameworthiness. We can take steps such as declining to express our blame as harshly as possible, being more readily disposed to forgive him if he recognizes his error, and so forth. By mitigating our response, we can make an unfortunately bad situation as fair and respectful as possible. The fact nevertheless remains that Victor is blameworthy, even though he would be rationally surprised to learn this about himself. 111 Kelly (2012: 256-257). 112 Kelly (2012: 258). 107 7. Conclusion We began by noting that appeals to what is fair and respectful to expect of persons was seemingly incompatible with the possibility of blame appropriately coming from the blue. But we have seen that these same appeals actually support the opposite conclusion in light of the Normative Fit Hypothesis: Persons can sometimes become blameworthy for performing actions that they cannot see reason to avoid. As a final resort, one might take this to be a reductio of appealing to fairness and respect to shed light on the epistemic conditions for blameworthiness. Although I lack the space to fully assess this response, this strikes me as a drastic measure given the plausibility of explanations from fairness and respect. It is perhaps appropriate to end with a word of caution. It is unsettling to think that we are liable to appropriately get blamed from the blue. We must therefore be careful that in arguing against this possibility we are not in fact unknowingly motivated by a fear of facing up to moral facts. There is some hope, after all: By taking an appropriately forgiving attitude towards others when they deserve blame from the blue, perhaps they will repay the favor if we are unlucky enough to deserve the same. There is also some benefit: Our recognition that we are all liable to deserve blame from the blue should moderate our confidence in our own abilities and temper the impulse to think that just because we can’t see reason to act some way, such reasons in fact do not exist. 108 Chapter 4: The Dark Knowledge Problem: Why Public Justifications are not Arguments Up to this point, I’ve articulated an externalized conception of public justification and defended this notion against various objections, culminating in the previous chapter with the Gausian’s objections that externalization is at odds with public justification’s supposed grounding in the reactive attitudes. In this final chapter, I turn to considering a further consequence of public justification and what we should consider to be the externalist conditions of the hybrid view in particular. Rawlsians are apt to feel the consequences of this chapter most acutely, but as with chapters one and two, I aim for my arguments to impact all versions of Public Reason Liberalism. We can begin to appreciate the consequences I want to get at by noting that ‘public justification’ is ambiguous. It can denote a state or condition a law can be in, or it can denote an interpersonal act. A law is publicly justified in the state sense just when all people who are reasonable have sufficient reason of the right kind to accept it. In the act sense, a public justification is an interpersonal justification that contributes to a law’s being in the state of public justification. This act consists in giving at least one reasonable person sufficient reason of the right kind to accept the law. We’ve seen that philosophers in the Public Reason Liberalism Tradition argue that public justification is necessary for appropriately exercising political authority under conditions of democratic pluralism. In spite of reasonable people sincerely wanting to cooperate on fair terms, they naturally hold a variety of conflicting perspectives about the good and the true. Public 109 Reason Liberals responded by claiming that preventing this clash of perspectives from creating authoritarian political relations requires reasonable people to adopt the original version of the Public Justification Principle. According to this principle, a law is legitimate (and so permissibly imposed) only if it is publicly justified in the state sense. We saw that this principle needed drastic revision but that public justification nonetheless survived as an important political good that all reasonable people ought to do their part to preserve. Furthermore, the notion of justifiability to reasonable people still has a close relation to legitimacy through the Legitimacy-Justification Principle. The political good of public justification would be fully realized if every law were to be publicly justified in the state sense. We saw in Chapter 1 that the vast majority of the time, the only way for a law to achieve a state of public justification is by reasonable people depending on interpersonal justifications from speakers in the news, on social media, through government websites, and so forth. 113 For the idea of public justification to be plausible, there must be a criterion for whether these interpersonal justifications count as public justifications. To this end, all proponents of what in the present chapter I will call the standard conception of public justification have assumed that interpersonal justifications count as public justifications only when they are representable as arguments that reasonable people would accept. 114 This criterion would be unsatisfied, for instance, if Addison appealed to the movements of a dowsing rod or crystal pendulum to justify where to drill a publicly funded well to Brianna, 113 Donahue (2020: 382-387). 114 For expressions of this criterion, see Rawls (1997: 786; 1999: 508-509), Mason (2007: 679), Gaus (2010: 184; 2011: 244-245, 247 236), Quong (2011: 141-142), Hartley and Watson (2018: 20, 84-85), and Vallier (2019: 97-98), among others. 110 who considered these techniques unscientific hocus-pocus. It would fail to be satisfied even if Addison explicitly argued that the drilling policy was based on sound science, Brianna accepted this argument, and Addison meanwhile implicitly based her decision exclusively on the dowsing rod and crystal. This might give Brianna sufficient reason to accept the law, but it would not be sufficient reason of the right kind. To satisfy the criterion, Addison must at least in principle be able to display the policy as sufficiently supported by an argument composed of premises that Brianna would accept and that is adequately elaborated so as to not substantively require Brianna to take Addison at her word. I claim to the contrary that public justifications are not arguments. Achieving the state of public justification does not necessarily consist in every listener who is at least internally reasonable being able to accept the law in virtue of accepting some kind of propositional content, such as a common stock of justificatory reasons or considerations expressed in disjunctive appeals to individual perspectives. 115 The view I propose in this chapter is that the state of public justification instead requires everyone who is at least internally reasonable to have the opportunity to accept a law by depending on interpersonal justifications from speakers with adequate moral character. Adopting this alternative conception of public justification is the best response to what I call the Dark Knowledge Problem. A person has dark knowledge that p just when she knows that p but would rationally reject the belief constituting her knowledge were she to learn its origin. In other words, dark knowledge is knowledge you have only because you are in the dark about how 115 I’m here referring to consensus and convergence views of public justification respectively. For an overview of this distinction, see Quong (2011: 261-265). 111 your belief came about. Suppose that relying on computer models to decide where to drill wells is sound science, but that Brianna rationally but falsely considers it hocus-pocus. Cecilia, a credentialed hydrologist, tells Brianna that drilling in Spot A will access water while not mentioning her claim relies on computer modeling. In the appropriate communicative circumstances, if Brianna believes what she is told, her belief that drilling in Spot A will access water counts as dark knowledge. Dark knowledge creates a problem because if we accept the foundational principles of the standard conception and a few practical constraints of communication, then we should expect interpersonal justifications in large and complex societies like ours to frequently produce good reason to accept laws on the basis of dark knowledge. These interpersonal justifications furthermore bear the essential hallmarks of public justifications. Nevertheless, these interpersonal justifications cannot be represented as arguments from premises that reasonable listeners would accept. They can even be given in contexts where this propositional content does not exist. Proponents of the standard conception are thereby forced to abandon the assumption that public justifications are arguments on pain of forfeiting more foundational principles of their theory. The Dark Knowledge Problem shows that public justifications are not arguments. Since we still need a criterion for whether interpersonal justifications count as public justifications, I suggest that only speakers adequately free of civic vice have standing to publicly justify laws. Not every kind of civic vice is relevant to public justification, but only ones that reasonable people can agree deserve exclusion. I will sketch a view of such vices. However, my primary focus will be on explaining the Dark Knowledge Problem and the revisions it requires for the theory of public 112 justification. Proponents of this theory have thought civic virtue is at most instrumentally beneficial for achieving public justification. 116 My view is that the civic virtue of the speakers reasonable people rely on not only makes a difference to which laws are publicly justified but moreover does so independently of the argumentative content these speakers offer. 117 Civic virtue thereby forms a constitutive part of public justification itself. 1. The Standard Conception of Public Justification Before considering this new territory into which the Dark Knowledge Problem forces us, we need to review and get a better idea of the standard conception of public justification. This conception is foundationally motivated by what we may call The Circumstances of Justice Principle: Acceptable political theories must be compatible with the circumstances of justice. 118 These are the circumstances under which people must work together to establish and maintain just political rule. I will charitably consider only the circumstances of justice in a realistic utopia where all people voluntarily conform to the rational and moral standards they set for themselves. In this situation, the circumstances of justice include physical limitations, such as a moderate scarcity of resources, and people’s inherent cognitive limitations. Political theories that violate this principle 116 See, for instance, Mason (2007: 679-681) and Schwartzman (2011: 377-378). 117 Audi (1998: 162-163) presents a broadly similar view in that he considers possessing civic virtue necessary for fulfilling some obligations of personal conduct in political discussions that is independent of the content of our contributions. He eschews linking his ideas to the necessary conditions for public justification, however. (ibid.: 158). 118 For some expressions of this principle in the broadly Rawlsian strain of Public Reason Liberalism, see Rawls (2005: 66) and Quong (2011: 37). Within a broadly Gaussian orientation, this principle (or something equivalent to it for my purposes) is implicit in the commitment to holding realistic expectations of people given their actual capacities for reasoning. See Gaus (2011: 235-258). 113 are consequently infeasible even in the best possible moral scenario we could hope for in a world like ours. 119 The original Public Justification Principle was motivated by the observation that there is one circumstance of justice that it is especially important for liberal political theories to accommodate, namely, the Fact of Reasonable Pluralism. 120 This refers to the fact mentioned earlier that people living under conditions of freedom inevitably form conflicting views about the good and true and disagree on their basis. People can moreover be reasonable in adopting these views even if they turn out to be false. That is, they can accept their views as the result of reasoning according to their best lights while sincerely wanting to cooperate on fair terms. The Fact of Reasonable pluralism is not a basic circumstance of justice but is instead the outcome of several others. Heading the typical list philosophers give is that the evidence bearing on which laws to accept is complex. 121 We should add, as a corollary, that the time to evaluate it is limited. It’s not hard to see that reasonable pluralism can easily exist under these circumstances even in a realistic utopia. Just consider the variety of opinion we find among even well-meaning experts about how to address pressing social issues like climate change or pandemic response. In addition to these circumstances, the emergence of reasonable pluralism requires non- authoritarian political conditions where disagreement is not harshly suppressed. The problem is that liberal theories morally require such non-authoritarian conditions and so reasonable disagreement is a foreseeable outcome of people adopting liberal theories to guide their behavior. Such theories are consequently in danger of violating the Circumstances of Justice 119 Quong (2011: 143). 120 See Quong (2011: 6) and Gaus (2011: xv-xvi). 121 See, for instance, Rawls (2005: 56), Quong (2011: 37), and Vallier (2019: 20). 114 Principle: they threaten to cause and permit some reasonable people to dominate others by imposing laws on the basis of their conflicting views. 122 Avoiding this result motivated Public Reason Liberals to adopt the Public Justification Principle. Recall that the basic idea was for commitment to this principle to accommodate the Fact of Reasonable Pluralism through being a commitment to acting with a kind of transparency. If a law is publicly justified, then all reasonable people can in some sense see sufficient reason from their perspectives to accept it. 123 Striving to justify laws on the basis of considerations that reasonable people can accept also respects reasonable people as free and equal in their capacity to make judgments. 124 Maintaining a state of public justification thereby reconciles reasonable people to the social order. It enables them to view they laws they live under as ones they could impose themselves and assures them that other reasonable people will respect them by not seeking to impose laws that conflict with their perspectives at the first opportunity. 125 Beyond this general description, public reason liberals have various opinions about how to interpret the Public Justification Principle. One thing they have all assumed so far, however, is that interpersonal justifications count as public justifications only if they are representable as arguments. 126 Jonathan Quong most explicitly states this assumption. As he says: Suppose the question is whether or not the proposition Q can be justified to Peter. Suppose the only valid justification for Q depends on premises A, B, and C. In order for Peter to be justified in believing Q, Peter must therefore also be justified in believing A, B, and C. But what if there is no way to justify A to Peter? The grounds for premise A might, for instance, be an eyewitness account of some event that Peter has no good reason to accept. 127 122 Quong (2011: 142-143). 123 See Nagel (1987: 232), Waldron (1987: 149), and Vallier (2020: 1112). 124 See Waldron (1987: 128), Gaus (2011: 17), Quong (2011: 2), and Vallier (2019: 9). 125 Lister (2013: 114-115). 126 See Footnote 2 for references. 127 Quong (2011: 141) 115 According to Quong, whether Peter’s belief in Q has been justified to him depends on whether he can be offered additional premises that are acceptable to his perspective to support his beliefs. As Quong continues, “In order to justify Q to Peter, we must also ensure all the premises and steps in our argument can be justified to Peter, and that may or may not be possible depending on Peter’s wider epistemic situation.” 128 For other writers, the assumption that public justifications are arguments lies just below the surface. Gerald Gaus and Kevin Vallier claim that reasons contribute to public justification only if members of the public can accept them by following a sound deliberative or inferential route from their perspectives. 129 Gaus and Vallier do not assume that people typically reason by explicitly following arguments. Yet it’s hard to imagine what an instance of sound deliberation or inference might look like that could not in principle be represented as an argument. Given the above general description of public justification and the textual evidence just mentioned, we can see that proponents of public justification have assumed the following Argument Representation Principle: A speaker’s interpersonal justification contributes to bringing about the state of public justification only if it can be represented as an argument for a conclusion derived via premises and inference rules the listener could accept, where this argument is adequately free of testifier-centered premises. A premise is ‘testifier-centered’ just when a listener lacks sufficient reason to accept it apart from the speaker’s credibility. Premises like this must be excluded to some extent for public justification to provide the kind of transparency the standard conception assumes. Suppose the 128 Quong (2011: 142). 129 See Gaus (2010: 184; 2011: 244-245, 247 236) and Vallier (2019: 97-98). 116 justification given to a listener is representable as something like the argument in the case of Transparencia from Chapter 1: ‘I’m a credible speaker, and the law I’m proposing is a good law. So, you ought to accept it.’ Sometimes, an argument like this might be the only evidence a listener can reflectively access to accept a law, and hearing it might even epistemically justify her in accepting it. But according to the standard conception, this justification would not count as a public justification unless the reasons given are compatible with the listener’s “wider epistemic situation”. The speaker must in principle be able to sincerely offer further considerations congruent with the listener’s perspective that could persuade her to accept the law. This meagerly informative testimony alone would not suffice. That said, there is disagreement about the extent to which arguments must be free of testifier-centered premises. Some proponents of public justification consider appealing to testifier-centered premises admissible when they state conclusions on which relevant scientific experts are in consensus. 130 However, the use of testifier-centered premises cannot go too far up without undermining the reasons for assuming the Argument Representation Principle in the first place. ‘I’m an expert, and the law proposed is a good law. So, you ought to accept it’ would not be an adequate argument either. Apart from the basic concern for transparency, the current literature suggests two more reasons for Assuming the Argument Representation Principle. First, there is the concern to avoid exploiting listener ignorance. 131 Speakers can induce listeners to accept laws by deliberately 130 For statements of this kind of view, see Kappel (2021: 620) and arguably Rawls (2005: 224). Other writers do not consider expert consensus alone sufficient to admissibly appeal to a claim in public justifications. See, for instance, Gaus (2011: 252-253), Badiola (2018: 416), Reid (2019: 491), and Vallier (2019: 23). 131 See Quong (2011: 265-267), Schwartzman (2011: 386), and Hartley and Watson (2018: 45). 117 withholding key reasons for imposing them when they know listeners would find them unacceptable. The Argument Representation Principle prevents testimony from contributing to public justification in such cases. Second, there are concerns about political stability. Proponents of public justification think that if a law is imposed on reasonable people on the basis of considerations they cannot accept, they will eventually become aware of this and reject the law. 132 This needn’t mean reasonable people will actively resist the law or foment civil disorder. But at the very least, they will not see adequate reason to accept it from their perspectives and will comply because of force rather than persuasion. Finally, it’s important to mention a reason that doesn’t motivate the Argument Representation Principle. One might think that true premises make better justifications and that adhering to the Argument Representation Principle is conducive to basing justifications on premises that are true. Even if the Argument Representation Principle has this effect, it is not a motive for adopting it within the standard conception. This is because accommodating the Fact of Reasonable Pluralism requires accepting what we might call the Truth Neutrality Principle: Neither the strength nor the status of an interpersonal justification as a public justification depends on whether it is based on considerations that are true, irrespective of whether the reasonable people to whom the justification is addressed would recognize them as true. If truth alone made a difference to a justification’s strength or status as a public justification, then reasonable people with true perspectives would have more power than others to contribute to legitimizing laws. This is contrary to respect owed to reasonable people as free 132 Rawls (2005: 119). 118 and equal in their capacity for judgment. 133 Accepting the view in question would also undermine the kind of political community public justification aims to foster. As Rawls says, “Holding a political conception as true, and for that reason alone the one suitable basis of public reason, is exclusive, even sectarian, and so likely to foster political division.” 134 Because all reasonable people consider their perspectives true, this view would result in all reasonable people demanding their justifications be privileged over others in political discourse. 2. Dark Knowledge This suffices to characterize the standard view of public justification. We can now turn to considering dark knowledge. To offer a more precise characterization, let us say that person S’s knowledge that p is dark just when S has other beliefs that would defeat S’s belief that p were S to learn the processes by and reasons for which S arrived at this belief. To see what dark knowledge can look like in practice, consider a case that I call Misleading Education. Suppose on the basis of your education and depictions in general culture you have rationally acquired a simplified view of science. It is furthermore not reasonable to expect you to develop a more complex one given your projects and interests. Because you hold this simplified view, you are disposed to consider some investigatory practice P unreliable, even though P is in fact reliable and supported by the best current science. One day, a reliable authority who also appears credible tells you Fact Y. As it happens, you are in no position to interact with this authority or any other who could give you credible testimony about Fact Y. But if you did, the 133 Hartley and Watson (2018: 48). 134 Rawls (2005: 129). 119 authority would truthfully inform you that she believes Fact Y because it was discovered by relying on practice P and that there are no alternative grounds to believe this fact. Learning these details would cause you to reject Fact Y. Nevertheless, you form the belief in Fact Y on the authority’s assurance. I claim that your belief in Fact Y is dark knowledge: you know Fact Y in spite of having other beliefs that would defeat your belief in Fact Y were you to learn the reasons why and the processed by which you acquired this belief. At this point, there are two concerns one might have, one conceptual and the other practical. The conceptual concern is that the combination of knowledge and defeaters that dark knowledge requires makes it impossible to exist. It would accordingly be good to have more assurance that this is not the case. Dark knowledge would be an incoherent concept if it were incompatible with either internalist or externalist views of epistemic justification. Dark knowledge is compatible with both views. Since these are all the views of epistemic justification on offer, there is no good reason to think that dark knowledge is conceptually incoherent. According to epistemic externalism, beliefs are justified only if they are the outcome of a sufficiently reliable process, regardless of whether the person who forms them could become reflectively aware of its reliability. 135 Dark knowledge is compatible with externalism. Consider again Misleading Education. Fact Y was discovered by relying on practice P, and P is reliable by stipulation. Furthermore, you learn about Fact Y from a reliable authority who is credible from your perspective. Depending on testimony from credible and reliable authorities who base what they say on reliable practices is itself a reliable way of forming beliefs. The most significant threat 135 Feldman (2003: 81, 105). 120 to your belief’s justification from an externalist perspective in the case I’ve described is that you are disposed to prefer testifiers who do not base their claims on procedure P. Even if you have this disposition, it cannot be plausibly construed as part of the way you form your belief in this case. Next, according to epistemic internalism, a belief is justified only if it is adequately supported by features of which the believer can become reflectively aware. 136 Dark knowledge is also compatible with internalism. On a standard internalist views, that a credible testifier has told you that p provides sufficient, defeasible support for the belief that p. Epistemologists disagree about whether credible testimony is a fundamental source of justification or one that is reducible to others, like sense perception, memory, and so forth. Yet this dispute is irrelevant for our concerns; epistemologists agree that credible testimony is a source of epistemic justification. In Misleading Education, a testifier who seems credible has told you Fact Y, thereby giving adequate, defeasible support to your belief in Fact Y. A potential cause for concern here is that there do seem to be defeaters to your belief in Fact Y, namely, that practice P is an essential source of support for Fact Y. This is no threat to the possibility of dark knowledge, however. Given any one of our beliefs, there is almost always some feature existing somewhere, whether a stray bit of testimony, a fact about our situation, and so forth, that could act as a defeater were we to become aware of it in isolation. 137 Avoiding skepticism on an internalist view therefore demands that features of our environment must be sufficiently easy to encounter to satisfy the defeasibility proviso. In Misleading Education, the 136 Bergmann (2006: 9). 137 Feldman (2003: 34-36). 121 relevant features of the environment are by stipulation not sufficiently easy to encounter and so your belief is not defeated. Based on the above considerations, dark knowledge is compatible with both internalism and externalism about epistemic justification. Therefore, its existence is conceptually possible. This brings us to our second, practical concern. It might be possible for dark knowledge to exist, but is this likely? If dark knowledge is hardly ever involved with reasonable judgments of which laws to accept, then the concept seems of little importance. I claim that this concern is also unfounded. We should expect dark knowledge to result from political deliberation about complex issues in societies like ours even in the morally best-case. This becomes apparent once we consider the practical demands of communication. Forming reasonable judgements about which laws to accept typically requires relying on testimony. This is because the evidence bearing on which laws we ought to accept is complex and the time any individual has to evaluate it is limited. Forming these judgments therefore requires a division of epistemic labor where we depend on guidance from speakers we judge credible. These speakers may be individual persons (a president, chancellor, scientific expert, etc.) or institutions (a department of government, a policy research center, a corporation, etc.). Next, consider what these relations of dependence involve. It is too practically demanding for speakers to make explicit all the considerations on which they base their testimony. 138 It is similarly too practically demanding for listeners to make explicit all the considerations that would lead them to reject testimony if they learned speakers relied on them. Speakers and listeners of course can sometimes communicate with each other about such details and further clarify or 138 Medvecky (2020: 82), in Epistemic Paternalism: Conceptions, Justifications, and Implications. 122 defend them as needed. But in many contexts – such as when speakers and listeners are too numerous or too disconnected to give each other this kind of attention – communication is a one-way street. Listeners have no information beyond what speakers have time to publicize, and speakers must guess at what considerations listeners would treat as grounds for rejecting their testimony. Interpersonal justifications for laws in such contexts easily produce dark knowledge. All that is required is a pairing of speaker and listener such that some of the implicit considerations on which the speaker bases her testimony are ones the listener would reject. If the listener and speaker are sufficiently disconnected from each other and the speaker is a reliable testifier, then it can be very difficult for the listener to become aware of these considerations. The speaker’s interpersonal justification for the law can then create dark knowledge on the listener’s part. Dark knowledge is moreover likely to be produced considering the size of most societies and the complexity of the reasons bearing on which laws to impose. Crafting laws responsibly requires integrating numerous empirical and moral considerations. This holds for laws about constitutional essentials, like the government’s structural features and basic rights and liberties. It also holds for laws about topics of general concern, like environmental regulations, public health interventions, economic policies, and so forth. Regulation to curb tobacco consumption, for example, might draw on research from economics, sociology, epidemiology, neurobiology, chemistry, and other disciplines and involve weighing values about autonomy, public health, the environment, and so forth. 139 The case is similar for laws about climate change, pandemic response, finance regulation, and various other issues. 139 National Cancer Institute (2007: 26). 123 Combining many expert viewpoints and publicizing the result creates relations of testimonial dependence like those described above. If we assume an interpersonal justification of a law about a complex issue has only a very small chance of producing dark knowledge for any given person – a tenth of a percent, for instance – then it becomes highly likely that dark knowledge will be produced in a significant minority of people when that justification is addressed to tens and hundreds of millions of people. Dark knowledge is therefore likely to be involved in judgments of which laws to accept. 3. The Dark Knowledge Problem We are now in a position to combine results from the previous sections into the Dark Knowledge Problem. To see the problem, consider a schematic situation involving a listener and credible speaker who are both sincerely committed to the ideal of public justification. This means the speaker is disposed to refrain from imposing a law if she believes it is unsupported by considerations others can accept and the listener is disposed to reject a law if she believes the same. Both of them are moreover reasonable and strive to respect reasonable people as free and equal. Suppose the speaker aims to publicly justify a law by addressing an argument consisting of premises P 1 , …, P n to an audience including the listener. We can assume the argument is sound, that the speaker has been reliable in giving her testimony, and that the listener accepts the law on the basis of this argument. Because the speaker is both credible and reliable, the listener knows each of these premises. However, suppose that the listener essentially relies on one of the premises P i as an instance of dark knowledge. By ‘essentially relies’, I mean that the following 124 joint condition has been satisfied. First, the considerations reflectively accessible to the listener apart from the premise leave her insufficient reason to accept the law. Second, there are no considerations aside from the ones the speaker presently depends on that she can sincerely communicate to the listener to replace this premise or provide it alternative support. If we assume the general kind of communicative circumstances described in the previous section, there are various ways this schema can be instantiated in practice. It’s worth naming a few to illustrate. First and most straightforwardly, P i might be a scientific claim like Fact Y that the speaker judges too confusing or time consuming to defend but that turns out to be supported by investigative practices the listener would reject. Second, the true objects of scientific consensus are often not simple statements but rather complicated claims about likelihoods. 140 The speaker could assert P i in the sincere attempt to render such a consensus and its policy implications intelligible. Laypersons often widely underestimate the probabilities scientists intend to correspond to informal likelihood statements, such as by assuming events described as ‘Very Likely’ (intended to correspond to a probability above 90%) have a probability close to 70% or even lower. 141 Expressions of scientific uncertainty can also easily be misunderstood as lack of adequate proof. 142 It is reasonable for speakers to compensate for such phenomena by framing scientific results as more certain than they are, and P i can be one of these simplified claims. Reasonable listeners can know P i just as we know that smoking causes cancer, that global average temperatures will continue to rise because of fossil fuel consumption, and other simplified claims. Yet it can easily happen that 140 Kappel (621) 141 Budescu et al. (2014). 142 Oreskes (2004). 125 some reasonable people would reject P i and any conclusions based on it were they to learn the more complicated likelihood statements that are the true object of consensus. In this way, interpersonal justifications for laws can produce dark knowledge even if appealing to testifier- centered premises is admissible when they are the object of expert consensus. And third, a listener can believe P i though so-called elite cue-taking. It can be rational for citizens to sort through the complex information confronting them by accepting polices based on talking points, slogans, and other simplified messages from political leaders, media personalities, and other civically engaged people they trust. 143 Empirical research suggests that this cue-taking sometimes results in citizens adopting policies against their earlier professed views, such as by initially supporting then opposing a government benefit after learning their favorite politician’s stance on the issue. 144 If the cue is given by a responsible and well-meaning politician, this change can be for the better. The cue could lead reasonable citizens to adopt policies and acquire knowledge they would lack if they compared the politician’s underlying reasoning to their own initial views. The argument featuring P i as a premise could constitute such a beneficial cue. We can by now see a pattern running through these examples. We can sincerely believe we are thinking in ways reasonable listeners can accept, simplify our thoughts in an honest and even beneficial effort to communicate, and yet have it turn out that they would reject what we say if they learned the more complicated story. In this way, speakers can cause listeners to accept laws through inadvertently imparting dark knowledge. But no matter how the schema is instantiated, our question is this: Can a law be publicly justified in such a situation? 143 See Downs (1957: 233) and Lupia and McCubbins (1998: 4-5). 144 Lenz (2012: 184-185). 126 We should first note that the listener in our schema is in an excellent epistemic position when she accepts the law. Her view is based on a sound argument and she knows each of its premises. The Truth Neutrality Principle of course requires us to consider these details irrelevant to the law’s public justification. Nevertheless, the listener’s epistemic position is still relevant to my argument. Human judgment tends to disobey principles. Dark knowledge not only illustrates a way we should expect persons to sometimes accept laws that is problematic for the theory of public justification; it also eliminates the urge to answer our question negatively because the listener bases her acceptance on false considerations. Dark knowledge forces us to answer our question only by appealing to the principles of public justification themselves. In this regard, the strongest support for a negative answer is that the Argument Representation Principle is unsatisfied. The listener essentially relies on premise P i as an instance of dark knowledge. There are accordingly no alternative considerations the speaker could sincerely appeal to in persuading the listener to accept P i, and the listener would reject this premise and the law were she to learn the considerations on which it is based. The only source of the listener’s sufficient, reflectively acceptable reason to accept premise P i is that that the speaker is credible. Consequently, there is no interpersonal justification of the law that can be represented as an argument free of testifier-centered premises that the listener would accept. If the Argument Representation Principle is correct, we must reject that the law is publicly justified. The Dark Knowledge Problem arises, however, in that the Argument Representation Principle conflicts in this situation with other, more foundational principles of public justification. To start, note that the strongest reasons that motivate accepting the Argument Representation Principle do not apply. There is no restriction on the number of premises P 1, …, P n in the speaker’s 127 argument. The only stipulation is that at least one premise essential to this argument is an item of dark knowledge for the listener. The situation is therefore compatible with the speaker’s meeting a basic requirement of transparency by using this argument to explain the law. The content the speaker communicates is not equivalent to her saying, ‘Trust me, you ought to accept the law’. Next, consider the worry about exploiting listener ignorance. It is true that the listener is ignorant about features of her epistemic situation she plausibly cares about, namely, that the only reasons supporting the law are ones she could not reasonably accept. No one is exploiting her ignorance, however. The speaker has sincerely tried and thinks she has succeeded in justifying the law by appealing to considerations that all reasonable people could accept. She respects people like the listener in that she would refrain from imposing the law if she learned they would reject the reasons on which her testimony is based. Her communicative situation ensures that she cannot easily gain this knowledge, however. Finally, there is the issue of stability. The listener’s acceptance of the law is stable because she knows each premise P 1, …, P n. This means that none of her beliefs in these premises are defeated. There is consequently no close possible world in which she learns the full range of reasons on which the speaker’s testimony is based so as to prompt her to reject the law. Moreover, the listener’s reflectively accessible reason to accept the law is based on the speaker’s credibility and the plausibility of her testimony’s content. She is not being coerced into accepting the law. Her acceptance is therefore stable for the right reasons. The last point to make is that the Argument Representation Principle conflicts with the Circumstances of Justice Principle. We saw in the previous section that we should expect dark 128 knowledge to be produced when communicating about political issues when the evidence bearing on them is complex and the time to evaluate it is limited. These factors are manifestly part of the conditions under which we necessarily work to establish and maintain cooperative political rule in contemporary societies and would even be present in a realistic utopia. Since it’s not only possible but likely that some justifications of laws will necessarily rely on dark knowledge when these factors are present, the Circumstances of Justice Principle requires political theories to be compatible with dark knowledge. But political theories that assume the Argument Representation Principle are incompatible with dark knowledge and so entail the widespread delegitimization of laws. Proponents of public justification are thereby faced with a choice: either the Circumstances of Justice Principle or the Argument Representation Principle must be rejected. One might try to circumvent this problem by seeking alternative reasons to think interpersonal justifications that essential depend on dark knowledge are not public justifications. However, this strategy is unpromising. The circumstances of justice that produce dark knowledge are part of the same circumstances that produce the Fact of Reasonable Pluralism, namely, that the evidence bearing on which laws to accept is complex and the time to evaluate it limited. Accommodating reasonable pluralism was the primary motive for adopting the Public Justification Principle. Proponents of public justification would be arbitrarily selective in what circumstances of justice they cared about if they took the Fact of Reasonable Pluralism seriously but dismissed the inevitability of dark knowledge. Since the motivations for upholding the Argument Representation Principle do not apply to the schematic situation we are considering, and since the Circumstances of Justice Principle is 129 more fundamental for proponents of public justification, the best response to the Dark Knowledge Problem is to reject the Argument Representation Principle. Public justifications are consequently not arguments, at least in the sense intended by proponents of the standard conception. Interpersonal justifications can contribute to achieving a state of public justification even when there is no argument free of inadmissible testifier-centered statements that a speaker could communicate to a reasonable listener to persuade her to accept a law. This result opens an explanatory gap for theories of public justification. Although public justifications arising from dark knowledge do not depend on arguments, they must depend on something. Whatever this factor is, it must be compatible with the general theory of public justification while also serving as an adequate replacement for the Argument Representation Principle. In the next section, I sketch my view about what this missing factor could be. 4. Civic Vice and Dark Knowledge There are limits to where we can locate the missing factor. An initial thought is that it is some property of the justificatory content speakers depend on that is neither reflectively accessible nor acceptable to listeners. The most plausible view along this line is that interpersonal justifications count as public justifications only if they are based on considerations that are true. The Truth Neutrality Principle rules out this possibility, however. Adopting this conception of public justification privileges the testimony of some reasonable speakers over others and leads to disputes about the truth that the theory’s proponents are eager to avoid. One might alternatively think the Dark Knowledge Problem shows that only factors related to justificatory content that is reflectively accessible matters for public justification. Most 130 plausibly, one could think that speakers contribute to public justification whenever their testimony provides listeners sufficient reflectively accessible reason to accept a law. A point in favor of this view is that some epistemically internalist condition like this must be at least necessary for public justification if the theory is to preserve the idea that laws ought to be acceptable to diverse perspectives. This view nevertheless has a significant problem. Turning public justification into a merely internalist notion makes public justification too cheap. To publicly justify a law, all that needs be done is ensure it appears good to reasonable people. Public justification could then come about through the kinds of bad behavior the Argument Representation Principle served to exclude. Exploitative speakers give listeners sufficient reflectively accessible reason when they trick them into accepting laws they would otherwise find objectionable. Overall, the missing factor can’t be a property of either the external or internal content of interpersonal justifications. It therefore plausibly has to do with the moral character of testifiers. I propose the relevant factor is whether speakers possess a character that adequately conforms with a public conception of civic virtue. In particular, a speaker’s interpersonal justification count as a public justification only if the speaker is free of substantial civic vice. Civic virtue consists in the set of dispositions persons can have that are beneficial to political community. 145 Civic vice by contrast involves dispositions that are detrimental to political community. A public conception of civic virtue is a package of civic virtues and vices and a way of thinking about them that all reasonable people could accept. Virtues in this package plausibly include sincerity, generosity, civility, and so forth. Vices in this package are ones all reasonable 145 See Audi (1998: 149) and Brennan (2012: 315-316). 131 people can agree citizens ought to lack, such as insincerity, stinginess, incivility, and so forth. Patriotism, piety, and a disposition to run for-profit business may be civic virtues, as some have claimed. This is a matter of reasonable dispute, however, and so they would not be part of a public conception of civic virtue. 146 There is good reason to target substantial civic vice as relevant to public justification. Civic vice more plausibly makes a difference to public justification than mere epistemic vice because epistemic vice is ultimately intelligible in terms of failure to track the truth. 147 Mere epistemic vice is consequently difficult to incorporate into a conception of public justification without violating the Truth Neutrality Principle. And civic vice more plausibly makes a difference to public justification than civic virtue because requiring civic virtue would be unreasonably demanding. Possessing substantial civic virtue is supererogatory. Possessing substantial civic vice, by contrast, is a condition we rightly demand all citizens avoid. Civic vice must be substantive to undermine one’s standing to publicly justify because minor civic vice – like the disposition to mix one’s recyclables with general waste – is surely compatible with public justification. Substantial civic vices include the disposition to deceive, to be flagrantly epistemically negligent by public standards, to violate role-based responsibilities of public concern, to be racist, sexist, homophobic and, in general, to act in ways incompatible with a political community where all persons respect each other as free and equal. Speakers with some of these character defects may produce epistemic justification for listeners with their testimony, 146 For arguments in favor of patriotism and the disposition to run for-profit business as civic virtues, see Macintyre (1995: 218) and Brennan (2012) respectively. 147 Some epistemic vices are civic vices and so matter for public justification. For instance, Meyer et al. (2021) argue that epistemic vices like sloppiness and obstinacy predict acceptance of misinformation. The view I’m dismissing is that all and only epistemic vices matter for public justification. 132 but their words cannot publicly justify. The same testimonial content contributes to achieving a state of public justification when given by speakers without this defect, however, as long as it gives listeners reflectively accessible reason to accept the law. There is a final aspect of my view worth emphasizing. For civic vice to replace the Argument Representation Principle, whether a speaker is free of substantial civic vice must be a condition that is sometimes epistemically external with respect to the perspectives of reasonable people. We can often tell when speakers are substantially vicious, and their testimony fails to publicly justify in such cases. But we can also lack reflectively accessible reason to think speakers are vicious when they in fact are, such as the kind of exploitative speakers whose justifications were excluded by the Argument Representation Principle. Testimony fails to contribute to public justification in such cases, even though reasonable people may believe it succeeds. The conception of public justification I’ve just sketched is morally plausible. Discovering that political leaders are substantially vicious typically undermines their legitimacy. For instance, in July 2019 a trove of text messages sent between Puerto Rico’s governor Ricky Rossello and his cabinet were made public. They showed Rossello openly making comments that were misogynistic, homophobic, and that mocked victims of hurricane Maria, which devastated the island two years earlier. The messages thereafter became the focal point of unprecedented bipartisan protests that forced Rossello’s resignation. 148 The repugnance felt toward civically vicious persons as office holders plausibly extends to vicious persons as contributors to political deliberation. Imagine having to depend on testimony from someone like Rossello to accept a law. Even if you had no reason to think the person was 148 Puerto Rico Governor Resigns After Mass Protests (25 July 2019). 133 being untruthful and in fact told you nothing false, the situation would still be deeply unsettling. The testimony would not enable you to view the law in the morally good light that is supposed to be supplied by public justification. In particular, you could not appropriately consider the law as imposed in the context of a political community where people respect each other as free and equal. This result has substantial theoretical support. G. A. Cohen has observed that the moral force of justification is speaker-relative. 149 To use a version of his example, suppose a kidnapper reasons with a parent, ‘You ought to pay me a ransom. Otherwise, your child will die an easily preventable death.’ Although the kidnapper’s interpersonal justification might epistemically justify the conclusion for the parent, it does not morally justify it. This is the case even though an argument with the same propositional content would provide moral justification if said by an innocent friend. In further analysis, Johann Frick argues that this effect is explained by testifier hypocrisy. The kidnapper’s justification hypocritically appeals to a value she is disposed to disregard, namely, the value of the child’s life. 150 We can similarly explain why a speaker’s moral character makes a difference to public justification. The act of public justification is a contribution to joint deliberation about what ought to be done in a political situation. Giving a public justification in such contexts assures others they can live under the law within a political community where people refrain from acting on each other for reasons they cannot accept. In most cases, public justification only implicitly expresses the value of such a community. Nevertheless, the assurance this act gives that this kind of 149 Cohen (2008: 38). 150 Frick (2016: 246). 134 community will be maintained distinguishes a society committed to the ideal of public justification from the merely strategic justifications exchanged in a modus vivendi, a political association where agreement on laws is the outcome of a chance congruence of interests. 151 I suggest the value of community implicitly expressed by the act of public justification enters among our reasons to accept the law. When someone publicly justifies a law to you, your reasons to accept it are not only those explicitly mentioned in the justification but also that you are in a position to accept the law within a community where people refrain from acting on each other for reasons they cannot accept. This is no small difference, for it changes whether you can appropriately see yourself as accepting the law in a modus vivendi or in a kind a political community you more highly value. However, when a speaker purporting to give you a public justification has substantial civic vice, hypocrisy enters the exchange. Similar to the kidnapper, the speaker appeals (if only implicitly) to a value of community she is disposed to disregard. Accordingly, in line with the view of the speaker-relativity of justification described above, the interpersonal justification is not a public justification. Gaining the missing assurance of community requires that at least one person of adequate character provides you sufficient reason to accept the law. This suffices for a basic defense of a virtue-loaded conception of public justification. Before concluding, I’d like to gesture toward some of its practical upshots. One might worry that the view I’ve sketched threatens the kind of authoritarianism that the ideal of public justification is supposed to avoid. If civic vice plays the role I propose, then safeguarding public justification seemingly requires forcing everyone with bad character from politics. 151 Lister (2016: 114-116). 135 I do not consider this worry significant. This is because our judgments of which laws to accept are typically based on multiple sources. On my view, if you encounter testimony from two speakers, one of whom has substantial civic vice while the other does not, then the law can be publicly justified to you as long as the speaker with adequate character gives you sufficient reason to accept the law. Public justification is undermined only in situations where reasonable people must depend on vicious speakers for information without readily available alternatives. My view supports at most ensuring testimonial networks are arranged to prevent such dependence. Assuming this has been achieved, the theory entails no further restrictions on vicious testifiers. This leads to an alternative worry, namely that my view makes little difference to practice. I should hasten to add that preventing inappropriate testimonial dependence is itself no small difference: it involves reducing the influence of persons with substantial civic vice over public discourse. This serves to illustrate the broader significance of my view. Public justification is an important political good that everyone should do their part to preserve. For listeners, this means that testimony contributing to justifications for laws from persons of substantial civic vice ought to be overlooked in favor of testimony from persons of adequate character. For speakers of substantial civic vice, the result might not typically be a restriction of one’s freedom to talk. But it does mean that one’s contributions should cancel out from public discourse about laws. A society’s commitment to the ideal of public justification thereby substantially changes how people view themselves as participants in political deliberation. 136 5. Conclusion The Dark Knowledge Problem reveals that proponents of public justification have generally overemphasized the role that appealing to reasons plays in our justificatory discourse about laws. Although appealing to reasons has its place (namely, in securing the epistemically internal conditions necessary for public justification) the civic virtue of speakers matters for whether they have standing to publicly justify laws and so forms a constitutive part of the state of public justification itself. This outcome makes sense. A common worry about public justification is that it requires us to justify laws to citizens who are morally reprehensible. Burton Dreben is sometimes quoted as responding to this criticism by saying that proponents of public justification don’t have to justify laws to Nazis. 152 My view can be seen as the modest suggestion that this attitude should be symmetric between the roles of speaker and listener. If proponents of public justification don’t have to talk to Nazis, they shouldn’t have to listen to them either. 152 See Quong (2011: 8) and van Schoelandt (2015: 1032). 137 A Coda About the Ideal of Public Justification In the beginning, our aim was to investigate the limits of a realistic utopia by addressing two questions. The first was, ‘How ought we live together?’ The second was, ‘What are the best conditions under which we can hope to live together?’ The hope was that we could avoid the kind of political existence the rat-king metaphorically represented though jointly recognizing that all reasonable people ought to live together by adhering to the ideal of public justification. This ideal was initially expressed through the Public Justification Principle. Over the previous chapters, we have seen that this principle requires substantial revision in light of the realist assumption that we often have to depend on testimony to form our beliefs about which laws to accept. The overall lesson of this work has been that a plausible ideal of public justification can be salvaged nonetheless. We should take a moment to review the ideal of public justification and how far it brings us from the rat-king life. Reasonable people have two roles to play in this ideal. One role is that of being governed. The other is of contributing to governing. To do one’s part in the latter role is to aim to impose laws on the basis of considerations that all reasonable people can accept. To do one’s part in the former role is to assess which laws to accept as best as one can from one’s perspective and to aim to depend on people who are adequately free of civic vice in making one’s assessments. We can now on reflection recognize that there is a three-part ideal organized around public justification that all reasonable people should progressively aim to achieve with respect to a law while they play these roles. The first two of these ideals correspond to a higher and lower form of public justification. The third ideal involves an absence of public justification, but is still 138 better than living in an all-out rat-king. The first ideal consists in attaining the highest form of public justification. This happens just when a law is justifiable to all reasonable people in virtue of considerations they would accept were they aware of them and that can be presented by individuals adequately free of civic vice. In other words, this first ideal is the original version of public justification as envisioned by proponents of high-standard views. All reasonable people ought to strive to achieve this ideal as it represents a situation where the law appears to be imposed for reasons one can accept and moreover is in fact imposed for such reasons by persons who are adequately committed to upholding a political community in which people are respected as free and equal. Although this first ideal is worth striving for, it is too much to hope that it can always be achieved even in political situations free of the threat of deception from unreasonable people. The Dark Knowledge Problem shows that we can miss this ideal while aiming for it as a foreseeable but unintended side-effect of communication. When this happens, we must settle for the lower form of public justification that constitutes the second ideal. This second ideal is achieved just when a law is justifiable to all reasonable people merely in that they have sufficient reflectively accessible reason to accept the law and they have this reason by depending on testimony from individuals adequately free of civic vice. The law is then in a state of public justification because both the internal and external condition of the hybrid view of justification are met in relation to all internally reasonable people, and the law is imposed in way consistent with an adequately respectful political community. This state is not the highest ideal of public justification, however. For the internal condition to be met, the law has to appear to be acceptable for reasons one can accept. Because the law does not conform to this appearance – 139 that is, because the reasons for which the law is in fact imposed are not acceptable to all internally reasonable people – reasonable people are not having the object of their desire satisfied when they accept the law in this situation. This second ideal is nevertheless better than the third, which is the lowest ideal we can realistically hope for that involves the notion of public justification to some extent. This third ideal is achieved just when the following two conditions are met. First, a law is justifiable to all people who are internally and externally reasonable but is not justifiable to at least one internally reasonable person. Second, the situation described in the first condition arises because of deception by a powerful deceiver. That is, a deceiver must have caused at least one internally reasonable person to either lack sufficient reflectively accessible reason to accept the law (thereby failing at least the internal condition for public justification) or to have such reason on account of inappropriate influence from the deceiver (thereby failing at least the external condition). Although the law is not in a state of public justification in this third ideal, it is still appropriate to consider it an ideal because a fragment of the state of public justification has been realized among all internally and externally reasonable people. 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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation investigates the epistemic conditions that must be satisfied for us to properly live together under the legal and moral rules that structure our societies. According to the philosophical tradition of Public Reason Liberalism, such rules are legitimate only if they are justifiable to the diverse perspectives found among all reasonable people. This dissertation investigates how this so-called Public Justification Principle can be true given that our beliefs often depend on testimony. I argue that the ideal of public justification expressed by this principle is compatible with depending on testimony only if we revise our conception of public justification to include epistemically externalist conditions. These revisions are encapsulated in two major changes. First, public reason liberals must view public justification as depending on both internal and external conditions. According to this hybrid view, not only whether the common rules appear good matters for whether they are publicly justified. Facts about what caused this appearance matter too, even if these facts are epistemically external in the sense that many people cannot be aware of them. Second, public justification must no longer be considered a necessary condition for legitimacy. Whether a law is legitimate instead depends on whether it is justifiable to all people who are internally and externally reasonable, where externally reasonable people lack beliefs that have been inappropriately caused by deception and manipulation. Articulating this externalized model of the ideal of public justification promises new insights into the importance of the civic virtue of testifiers and why spreading political information is morally wrong.

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Creator Donahue, Sean Crain (author)

Core Title Public justification beyond legitimacy

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Philosophy

Degree Conferral Date 2022-08

Publication Date 05/07/2022

Defense Date 04/15/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag epistemic externalism,OAI-PMH Harvest,political legitimacy,public justification,public reason,testimony

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Quong, Jonathan (committee chair), Altman, Scott (committee member), Finlay, Stephen (committee member), Hawthorne, John (committee member), Schroeder, Mark (committee member)

Creator Email scd.donahue@gmail.com,sdonahue@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC111297271

Unique identifier UC111297271

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Donahue, Sean Crain

Type texts

Source 20220509-usctheses-batch-940 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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