Reasonable Comprehensive Doctrines

§ 1

The second basic aspect of our being reasonable is, I have said, our recognizing and being willing to bear the consequences of the burdens of judgment. I shall now try to show how this aspect limits the scope of what reasonable persons think can be justified to others, and how this leads to a form of toleration and supports the idea of public reason (VI).

Assume first that reasonable persons affirm only reasonable comprehensive doctrines. Now we need a definition of such doctrines. They have three main features. One is that a reasonable doctrine is an exercise of theoretical reason: it covers the major religious, philosophical, and moral aspects of human life in a more or less consistent and coherent manner. It organizes and characterizes recognized values so that they are compatible with one another and express an intelligible view of the world. Each doctrine will do this in ways that distinguish it from other doctrines, for example, by giving certain values a particular pri­macy and weight. In singling out which values to count as espe­cially significant and how to balance them when they conflict, a reasonable comprehensive doctrine is also an exercise of practi­cal reason. Both theoretical and practical reason (including as appropriate the rational) are used together in its formulation. Finally, a third feature is that while a reasonable comprehensive view is not necessarily fixed and unchanging, it normally belongs to, or draws upon, a tradition of thought and doctrine. Although stable over time, and not subject to sudden and unexplained changes, it tends to evolve slowly in the light of what, from its point of view, it sees as good and sufficient reasons.

This account of reasonable comprehensive doctrines is delib­erately loose. We avoid excluding doctrines as unreasonable without strong grounds based on clear aspects of the reasonable itself. Otherwise our account runs the danger of being arbitrary and exclusive. Political liberalism counts many familiar and tra­ditional doctrines — religious, philosophical, and moral — as rea­sonable even though we could not seriously entertain them for ourselves, as we think they give excessive weight to some values and fail to allow for the significance of others. A tighter criterion is not, however, needed for the purposes of political liberalism.

§ 2

The evident consequence of the burdens of judgment is that reasonable persons do not all affirm the same comprehensive doctrine. Moreover, they also recognize that all persons alike, including themselves, are subject to those burdens, and so many reasonable comprehensive doctrines are affirmed, not all of which can be true (indeed none of them may be true). The doctrine any reasonable person affirms is but one reasonable doctrine among others. In affirming it, a person, of course, believes it to be true, or eise reasonable, as the case may be.

Thus, it is not in general unreasonable to affirm any one of a number of reasonable comprehensive doctrines. We recognize that our own doctrine has, and can have, for people generally, no special claims on them beyond their own view of its merits. Others who affirm doctrines different from ours are, we grant, reasonable also, and certainly not unreasonable. Since there are many reasonable doctrines, the idea of the reasonable does not require us, or others, to believe any specific reasonable doctrine, though we may do so. When we take the step beyond recogniz­ing the reasonableness of a doctrine and affirm our belief in it, we are not being unreasonable.

§ 3

Beyond this, reasonable persons will think it unreasonable to use political power, should they possess it, to repress compre­hensive views that are not unreasonable, though different from their own. This is because, given the fact of reasonable pluralism, a public and shared basis of justification that applies to compre­hensive doctrines is lacking in the public culture of a democratic society. But such a basis is needed to mark the difference, in ways acceptable to a reasonable public, between comprehensive beliefs as such and true comprehensive beliefs.

Since many doctrines are seen to be reasonable, those who insist, when fundamental political questions are at stake, on what they take as true but others do not, seem to others simply to insist on their own beliefs when they have the political power to do so. Of course, those who do insist on their beliefs also insist that their beliefs alone are true: they impose their beliefs be­cause, they say, their beliefs are true and not because they are their beliefs. But this is a claim that all equally could make; it is also a claim that cannot be made good by anyone to citizens generally. So, when we make such claims others, who are them­selves reasonable, must count us unreasonable. And indeed we are, as we want to use state power, the collective power of equal citizens, to prevent the rest from affirming their not unreasona­ble views.

To conclude: reasonable persons see that the burdens of judg­ment set limits on what can be reasonably justified to others, and so they endorse some form of liberty of conscience and freedom of thought. It is unreasonable for us to use political power, should we possess it, or share it with others, to repress compre­hensive views that are not unreasonable.

§ 4

To tonfirm this conclusion, let us look at the case from another point of view and say: citizens as free and equal have an equal share in the corporate political and coercive power of society, and all are equally subject to the burdens of judgment. There is no reason, then, why any citizen, or association of citizens, should have the right to use the state's police power to decide constitutional essentials or basic questions of justice as that person's, or that association's, comprehensive doctrine di­rects. This can be expressed by saying that when equally repre­sented in the original position, no citizen's representative could grant to any other person, or association of persons, the political authority to do that. Such authority is without grounds in public reason. What would be proposed instead is a form of toleration and freedom of thought consistent with the preceding reasoning.

Observe that here being reasonable is not an epistemological idea (though it has epistemological elements). Rather, it is part of a political ideal of democratic citizenship that includes the idea of public reason. The content of this ideal includes what free and equal citizens as reasonable can require of each other with re­spect to their reasonable comprehensive views. In this case they cannot require anything contrary to what the parties as their representatives in the original position could grant. So, for ex­ample, they could not grant that everyone must affirm a particu­lar comprehensive view. As I note later (VI:4.4), this means that the guidelines and procedures of public reason are seen as se­lected in the original position and belong to the political concep­tion of justice. As I remarked earlier (§1.4), the reasonable, in contrast with the rational, addresses the public world of others. The original position as a device of representation helps to show how it does so.

§ 5

I add two further comments. The first is about the skepti­cism that may seem to be suggested by the account of the bur­dens of judgment. Since skepticism must be avoided if an over­lapping consensus of reasonable doctrines is to be possible, the account of those burdens must not proceed as a skeptical argu­ment. Such arguments offer a philosophical analysis of the con­ditions of knowledge, say of the external world of objects. After examining our ordinary ways of inquiry, they come to the conclu­sion that we cannot know those objects because one or more of the necessary conditions of knowledge can never be satisfied. Descartes and Hume said this in their different ways.

The account of the burdens of judgment does none of these things. It simply lists some of the circumstances that make polit­ical agreement in judgment, especially in judgments about com­prehensive doctrines, far more difficult. This difficulty is borne out by historical experience, by centuries of conflict about reli­gious, philosophical, and moral beliefs. Political liberalism does not question that many political and moral judgments of certain specified kinds are correct and it views many of them as reasonable. Nor does it question the possible truth of affirmations of faith. Above all, it does not argue that we should be hesitant and uncertain, much less skeptical, about our own beliefs. Rather, we are to recognize the practical impossibility of reaching reasonable and workable political agreement in judgment on the truth of comprehensive doctrines, especially an agreement that might serve the political purpose, say, of achieving peace and concord in a society characterized by religious and philosophical differ­ences. The limited scope of this conclusion is of special impor­tance. A constitutional regime does not require an agreement on a comprehensive doctrine: the basis of its social unity lies else­where.

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