Public Reason

Public reason is the set of reasons – principles and ideals – that all citizens “may reasonably be expected to endorse”, the set of reasons, that is, which are acknowledged as good reasons by an “overlapping consensus of all reasonable people”. The question whether the opinions that overlap in this consensus are correct or true, and whether those reasons are valid or sound, is to be set aside by public reason, i.e. in decision-making on the fundamental questions of political life and legislation. This drastic restriction of public reason’s content and grounding is asserted and defended by Rawls as an implication or requirement of the principle or criterion of reciprocity, viz. that the reasons employed and decisions accordingly made must be reasons and decisions that the decision-makers believes could reasonably be accepted by other people as free and equal citizens.


Chapter 37 of Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), Hobbes asserts that the question whether it may be taught that miracles occur, e.g. that transubstantiation occurs in the Mass, is one “In which … we are not every one to make our own private reason or conscience, but the public reason, that is the reason of God's supreme lieutenant, judge; and indeed we have made him judge already, if we have given him a sovereign power to do all that is necessary for our peace and defence. A private man has always the liberty, because thought is free, to believe or not believe in his heart those acts that have been given out for miracles…. But when it comes to confession of that faith, the private reason must submit to the public; that is to say, to God's lieutenant” .



Finnis J., On 'Public Reason', University of Oxford - Faculty of Law;
www.law.ox.ac.uk





His heart, Satan professes in his soliloquy, “melts” when he contemplates the endlessly cruel revenge he is about to take on the “harmless innocence” of our first parents. But he is compelled, he says, to this revenge -- a deed that otherwise even he would “abhor”. Compelled by what? “Public reason just”, that is, “Honour and empire [rulership] with revenge enlarg’d / By conquering this new world” – the human world from “now” down to the world’s end. And there his soliloquy ends. The poet’s immediate comment is more famous with us: “So spake the Fiend, and with necessity, / The tyrant's plea, excus'd his devilish deeds.” (Book iv, ll. 380-94)


“ ‘…Hell shall unfold,
To entertain you two, her widest gates,
And send forth all her kings; there will be room,
Not like these narrow limits, to receive
Your numerous offspring; if no better place,
Thank him who puts me, loath, to this revenge
On you, who wrong me not, for him who wrong'd.
And, should I at your harmless innocence
Melt, as I do, yet public reason just--
Honour and empire with revenge enlarg'd
By conquering this new world--compels me now
To do what else, though damn'd, I should abhor.’
So spake the Fiend, and with necessity,
The tyrant's plea, excus'd his devilish deeds.”