Senchaudhuri, Esha
(2011)
A critique of pure public reason.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
Contemporary political liberalism defends the view that any legitimate law ought to be
justified to those reasonable citizens subject to it. A standard way in which to accomplish
this task is to construct a set of public reasons, comprised of constitutional essentials and
public democratic values, which are then used to justify all political mandates. The
dissertation begins with a criticism of this process of justification for outcomes of legitimate
procedures of public decision-making. It argues that given how reasons contribute to
judgment formation, it is highly optimistic to assume that reasonable consent on procedures
of collective decision-making correspond to the justifiability of procedural outcomes.
Instead, I argue for an ideal of legitimate decision-making which enables each citizen to
assume a threshold level of personal responsibility for all political decisions made by the
political collective.
Integrating responsibility into a theory of liberal legitimacy requires a reformulation of the
rules of public justification. I argue that citizens concerned with making responsible political
decisions must be allowed to justify their political positions through both reasonable
judgments as well as sympathetic judgments such as compassion for those who live with
disability and mercy towards the criminally motivated. The notion of sympathy, as
formulated by David Hume and expanded by Adam Smith, provides an account of how
individuals’ ethical evaluations are affected by their ability to be in fellow-feeling with other
people. A substantial portion of my doctoral thesis considers the situations in which a
private judgment couched in sympathetic terms can meet political liberalism’s demands of
publicity and reciprocity.
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