Month: January 2012

I’ve written a longish review of Jerry Gaus’s The Order of Public Reason (CUP, 2010).  The review is called “The Classical Tilt of Justificatory Liberalism,” because I raise some doubts about whether justificatory liberalism does incline in favour of classical liberalism, as against social justice liberalism.  However, the main purpose of the essay is just to lay out Gaus’s overall argument about how the authority we claim over each other’s conduct in ordinary social morality can be justified.  The answer, perhaps not surprisingly given the title of the book, is “only if this morality is publicly justifiable,” (where “publicly justifiable” has its technical sense of “being acceptable to each and everyone one of a range of reasonable but conflicting points of view,” rather than the ordinary meaning of “being justifiable in public, without need for (noble) lies”).  The book also argues that, correctly understood, our everyday moral practices (e.g. feeling and expressing resentment, indignation, forgiveness, and so on) presuppose a recognition of others as free and equal persons.  And the book reconciles the explanatory / evolutionary / Humean perspective on morality with the justificatory / Kantian perspective on morality.  All that for the low price of CDN $60.78 (low on a per page basis, that is; it’s 549 pages long, not counting appendices etc.).  This is a very ambitious book because it aims to synthesize a wide range of material from diverse fields in the service of a general argument that unfolds over the course of the whole book (comparable to A Theory of Justice, in that respect).  My main aim was to state that overall argument in a radically condensed form.  And of course to question the classical tilt.