The Burdens of Judgement

§ 1

The first basic aspect of the reasonable, then, is the willing­ness to propose fair terms of cooperation and to abide by them provided others do. The second basic aspect, as I review now, is the willingness to recognize the burdens of judgment and to accept their consequences for the use of public reason in direct­ing the legitimate exercise of political power in a constitutional regime.

Recall that in the first lecture (I:6) we noted two general facts about the public culture of a constitutional regime: the fact of reasonable pluralism and the fact that this diversity can be over­come only by the oppressive use of state power. These facts call for explanation. For why should free institutions lead to reasonable pluralism, and why should state power be required to sup­press it? Why does not our conscientious attempt to reason with one another lead to reasonable agreement? It seems to do so in natural science, at least in the long run.

There are, of course, various explanations. We might suppose, say, that most people hold views that advance their own more narrow interests; and since their interests are different, so are their views. Or perhaps people are often irrational and not very bright, and this mixed with logical errors leads to conflicting opinions. But while such explanations explain much, they are too easy and not the kind we want. We want to know how reasonable disagreement is possible, for we always work at first within ideal theory. Thus we ask: how might reasonable disagreement come about?

§ 2

One explanation is this. Let's say that reasonable disagree­ment is disagreement between reasonable persons: that is, be­tween persons who have realized their two moral powers to a degree sufficient to be free and equal citizens in a constitutional regime, and who have an enduring desire to honor fair terms of cooperation and to be fully cooperating members of society. Given their moral powers, they share a common human reason, similar powers of thought and judgment: they can draw infer­ences, weigh evidence, and balance competing considerations.

The idea of reasonable disagreement involves an account of the sources, or causes, of disagreement between reasonable per­sons so defined. These sources I refer to as the burdens of judgment. The account of these burdens must be such that it is fully compatible with, and so does not impugn, the reasonable­ness of those who disagree. What, then, goes wrong? An expla­nation of the right kind is that the sources of reasonable disagree­ment — the burdens of judgment — among reasonable persons are the many hazards involved in the correct (and conscientious) exercise of our powers of reason and judgment in the ordinary course of political life.

As reasonable and rational we have to make different kinds of judgments. As rational we have to balance our various ends and estimate their appropriate place in our way of life; and doing this confronts us with grave difficulties in making correct judgments of rationality. On the other hand, as reasonable we must assess the strength of peoples' claims, not only against our claims, but against one another, or on our common practices and institu­tions, all this giving rise to difficulties in our making sound reasonable judgments. In addition, there is the reasonable as it applies to our beliefs and schemes of thought, or the reasonable as appraising our use of our theoretical (and not our moral and practical) powers, and here too we meet the corresponding kinds of difficulties. We need to keep in mind these three kinds of judgments with their characteristic burdens.

§ 3

Except for the last two sources below, the ones I mention are not peculiar to the reasonable and the rational in their moral and practical use; items (a) to (d) apply mainly to the theoretical uses of our reason. Also, the list I give is not complete. It covers only the more obvious sources.

a. The evidence — empirical and scientific — bearing on the case is conflicting and complex, and thus hard to assess and evaluate.

b. Even where we agree fully about the kinds of consid­erations that are relevant, we may disagree about their weight, and so arrive at different judgments.

c. To some extent all our concepts, and not only moral and political concepts, are vague and subject to hard cases; and this indeterminacy means that we must rely on judg­ment and interpretation (and on judgments about interpre­tations) within some range (not sharply specifiable) where reasonable persons may differ.

d. To some extent (how great we cannot teil) the way we assess evidence and weigh moral and political values is shaped by our total experience, our whole course of life up to now; and our total experiences must always differ. Thus, in a modern society with its numerous offices and positions, its various divisions of labor, its many social groups and their ethnic variety, citizens' total experiences are disparate enough for their judgments to diverge, at least to some degree, on many if not most cases of any significant complexity.

e. Often there are different kinds of normative considerations both sides of an issue and it is difficult to make an overall assessment

f. Finally, as we note in referring to Berlin's view (V:6.2), any system of social institutions is limited in the values it can admit so that some selection must be made from the full range of moral and political values that might be real­ized. This is because any system of institutions has, as it were, a limited social space. In being forced to select among cherished values, or when we hold to several and must restrict each in view of the requirements of the others, we face great difficulties in setting priorities and making adjust­ments. Many hard decisions may seem to have no clear answer.

§ 4

So much for some sources of the difficulties in arriving at agreement in judgment, sources that are compatible with those judging being fully reasonable. In noting these six sources — these burdens of judgment — we do not, of course, deny that prejudice and bias, self- and group interest, blindness and willful­ness, play their all too familiar part in political life. But these sources of unreasonable disagreement stand in marked contrast to those compatible with everyone's being fully reasonable.

Religious and philosophical doctrines express views of the world and of our life with one another, severally and collectively, as a whole. Our individual and associative points of view, intel­lectual affinities, and affective attachments, are too diverse, es­pecially in a free society, to enable those doctrines to serve as the basis of lasting and reasoned political agreement. Different conceptions of the world can reasonably be elaborated from different standpoints and diversity arises in part from our distinct perspectives. It is unrealistic — or worse, it arouses mutual suspi­cion and hostility — to suppose that all our differences are rooted solely in ignorance and perversity, or else in the rivalries for power, status, or economic gain.

Der Pluralismus selbst ist vernünftig. Die Wille-zur-Macht-Argumentation ist nur die Kehrseite des unbedingten Wahrheitsanspruchs.

These remarks lead to a fifth general fact stated thus: that many of our most important judgments are made under condi­tions where it is not to be expected that conscientious persons with full powers of reason, even after free discussion, will all arrive at the same conclusion. Some conflicting reasonable judg­ments (especially important are those belonging under peoples' comprehensive doctrines) may be true, others false; conceivably, all may be false. These burdens of judgment are of first signifi­cance for a democratic idea of toleration.

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