Reasonableness as a virtue of citizenship and the opacity respect requirement

1. Introduction

The practical virtue of reasonableness is a fundamental concept in the literature concerning political liberalism and public justification. Reasonableness is the virtue that allows individuals to understand reciprocity as well as accepting the epistemological limits we share as fallible agents. In this article, my goal is to defend a specific account of reasonableness, partly departing from the Rawlsian view on reasonableness. According to Rawls, reasonable citizens are those able to reach a stable overlapping consensus on a liberal conception of justice and restraining themselves from employing strictly private reasons while debating political matters. In this article, I criticize Rawls’s view for two main reasons: (i) I argue that reasonableness should be understood as a practical virtue of citizenship, rather than as an adequate criterion for assessing doctrines and even political decisions reached through legitimate political processes; (ii) my account combines both moral and epistemic dimensions of reasonableness, with an acceptance to engage with an epistemological analysis of the nonideal circumstances of justice that Rawls mostly abstains from.

In this article, I defend an account of reasonableness that I believe is more consistent with the phenomenology of intersubjective exchanges among citizens over political matters in contexts of deep disagreement. Furthermore, I will show that the definition of reasonableness I support is less dependent on a stringent requirement of public reason, therefore proving to be compatible with accounts of political legitimacy that are less demanding in terms of the requirement of abstaining from introducing private reasons in the public arena. Finally, I frame the discussion of the practical virtue of reasonableness within the general paradigm that identifies citizens as ‘co-authors of democratic decisions’ in order for these decisions to be legitimated. Here, I argue that the liberal ideals of ascribing members of the constituency the status of free and equal citizens and procedurally granting to everybody the possibility of impacting public choices can be fulfilled when coupled with a correct specification of the kind of recognition citizens owe each other. I conclude that as co-authors of political decisions, ideally, citizens should be able to acknowledge each other as both practical and epistemic authorities. In carving out my proposal, I begin by unpacking the role that the concepts of rationality and reasonableness have played in the development of the liberal account of political legitimacy (§2). In §3 and §4, I characterize my revised account of the classic Rawlsian notion of reasonableness. Then, I test the adequacy of my proposal against two important interpretations of reasonableness, those of Martha Nussbaum and Steven Wall (§5). Finally, in §6, I provide a specification of the kind of recognition that citizens owe each other when they engage in political decision-making and face disagreement with one another. I conclude that the normative principle of equal respect – when specified as opacity respect – requires political institutions, as well as reasonable citizens, to ascribe the status of putative practical and epistemic authorities to each member of the constituency.

2. Political legitimacy: Why rationality is not enough

The distinction between rationality and reasonableness has been extensively investigated in political theory, specifically in the attempt to carve out different models of political legitimacy whose normativity stems from the agreement that rational (and reasonable) agents are able to reach about a cooperative scheme. The distinction between these two concepts is related to some fundamental topics concerning political legitimacy. Traditionally, normative conditions for a legitimate state have been grounded in the appeal to the rationality of the agents who are involved in the collective decision concerning the formation of the state. Contractarianism appeals to the notion of social contract and some theorists in this tradition, most famously Hobbes, have argued that the content of morality is derived from the public agreement that individuals freely decide to abide by. Hobbes grounds his theory of political legitimacy in the self-interest of agents, claiming that cooperation is the preferable solution to coordination problems if and only if it proves to be mutually advantageous for rational agents to engage in (Hobbes 1994 [1651]). According to Hobbes, morality is an artificial concept that is publicly constructed once autonomous agents realize that it is rational for them to cooperate and stably abide by cooperative schemes. The equal stand of individuals stems from their common rationality (and approximately equal strength), rather than being derived from an equal moral status of persons. At the root of contractarianism, there is an appeal to rationality as one of the sources of normativity. Yet, rationality as an agential virtue can be interpreted in two slightly different ways: (i) a rational agent is an agent who tries to maximize the satisfaction of her own interests while bargaining with others; (ii) a rational agent is an agent who pursues her interests in a way that is compatible with other individuals pursuing their own interests.

These two meanings of rationality differ in referring to the way in which a rational agent takes into account other agents’ interests. A rational individual, being a prudent self-interested agent, would always take into consideration others’ interests; however, there are different ways in which such ‘taking into consideration’ can be spelled out. In (i), the agent reasons upon others’ interests merely as external factors that affect her own attempt to pursue her goals. In (ii), instead, the rational agent evaluates her own interests and the best way to achieve them starting from an awareness of others’ attempts to pursue their own goals and a recognition of their own right to do so, as much as she is doing so herself. According to Sibley (1953, 557), the second account of rationality implies ‘a preparedness to be objective not in a merely logical, but also in a distinctively moral sense’ – in this sense, such an agent proves to be reasonable as much as rational.

More recently, John Rawls has analysed the normative differences between rationality and reasonableness as practical virtues. ¹ In his first book A Theory of Justice (1971, hereafter TJ), Rawls, revitalizing social contract theory, introduces and justifies specific principles of justice that he claims all rational agents would agree upon, under certain idealized conditions. Rawls believes that rational agents, defined as being mutually disinterested and not envious (1971, 124), if compelled to reason without knowing their actual biography, their position in society, their ascriptive characteristics, their social status and so on would end up acting as impartial individuals moved by benevolence, ² even though such an attitude is not presupposed as a moral feature of agents. Here Rawls seems loyal to Hobbes’s notion of self-interested agents who are able to publicly coordinate their goals and interests and therefore socially construct a set of norms that all subjects consider valid and legitimate. Without the need to presuppose any benevolent attitude towards others, it is the rationality we share as self-interested agents which propels us to abide by some common rules that have been properly selected through the normative device of the original position. However, in his second book Political Liberalism (1993, hereafter PL), Rawls deeply revises his theory of political legitimacy, trying to address the actual circumstances of justice (such as the fact of pluralism and the existence of unreasonable people). This shift involves a more troublesome attempt – of which Rawls seems to me fully aware – to achieve a balance between justificatory, motivational and feasibility concerns.

According to my reading of PL, Rawls’s main goal in this book is to provide a full justification for a strictly political conception of liberalism starting from the ‘here and now’ of contemporary political societies. In PL, Rawls tries to balance the normative goal of finding compelling justificatory arguments in support of his conception of justice (philosophical constraint) with the challenge of respecting the deep disagreement that characterizes contemporary political societies, therefore testing whether actual members of the political constituency can adequately support the conception of justice (stability for the right reasons constraint). Specifying these two constraints is relevant, as they demonstrate the difficulty of finding an adequate balance between justice-requirements and the attempt to establish legitimacy for political authority in the face of deep pluralism.

It is against this background that Rawls revises his account of practical rationality. In TJ, Rawls had faith in the possibility that the rationality we share as self-interested agents was enough – provided the normative constraints of the veil of ignorance – to provide a common ground for establishing publicly justified principles of justice. In PL, instead, Rawls reckons it is impossible to subsume all the differences under the Hobbesian motivational drive of peaceful coexistence. Rawls therefore asserts that in TJ he did not properly distinguish between stability as modus vivendi and stability for the right reasons. Stability as modus vivendi is the kind of stability that can be reached when agents reason rationally according to meaning (i) of rationality, discussed above. In contrast, stability for the right reasons requires that agents take into consideration other agents’ perspectives not just as external constraints on the attempt to achieve their goals, but rather as part of a reciprocity scheme (ii). When distinguishing between rational and reasonable, Rawls (1993, 48–58) claims that rational agents are able to pursue a conception of the good thanks to a self-centred perspective that very often (but not necessarily always) employs a means-ends way of reasoning. A reasonable person, instead, is aware of the normative constraint of reciprocity and is ready to accept a public reason constraint that turns out to be extremely pressing once the fact of pluralism is assumed to be a stable epistemic circumstance of political societies. The fundamental line of distinction between rationality and reasonableness is that an agent might be rational even in the case where she is the only person alive on Earth, whereas, for being reasonable, she needs at least a second person with whom to establish a relation of mutual reciprocity. ³

In a context of deep disagreement, Rawls argues, citizens, in order to reason together in a fruitful way, have to restrain themselves from publicly appealing to private reasons, ⁴ which might not have any normative force over other citizens who do not share the same conception of the good. In PL, Rawls clearly states that a conception of justice ‘should be, as far as possible, independent of the opposing and conflicting philosophical and religious doctrines that citizens affirm’ (1993, 9). In an attempt to apply ‘the principle of toleration to philosophy itself’ (1993, 10), Rawls develops a conception of justice that, being freestanding and abstaining from metaphysical and epistemic analyses, can be publicly justified, as reasonable citizens need to find agreement over political matters, not resolve all sources of disagreement. This shift is important: a public and strictly political conception of justice is legitimate if and only if it proves to be justifiable for a constituency of reasonable citizens, where reasonable citizens are those who are self-interested, but who are also able to recognize and abide by some specific reciprocity constraints. The specification of such constraints is the topic of the next section.

3. The practical virtue of reasonableness

In presenting some of the reasons that motivated Rawls to propose a political turn in his approach to political legitimacy, I highlighted the fact that the theory developed in PL specifically tries to be consistent with, and attuned to, the actual circumstances of justice. The actual circumstances of justice are composed of historical, sociological, anthropological and epistemological facts. Rawls deals with the epistemological aspects through the exposition of the burdens of judgement, ‘hazards involved in the correct (and conscientious) exercise of our powers of reason and judgment in the ordinary course of political life’ (1993, 56) that explain why reasonable agents permanently disagree about many matters of politics and life. Thanks to the description of the burdens of judgement as a stable circumstance of our social life, Rawls can proceed to define disagreement as an inescapable fact of the political domain and, even more precisely, as a proof that liberal and democratic societies function well, allowing citizens to enjoy equal liberty of conscience and freedom of thought. Disagreement is not something we – as citizens and as politicians or political theorists – can circumscribe as an irrelevance, or simply describe as the outcome of flawed procedures of reasoning or as a fact generated by the unreasonable attitudes of citizens. In fact, recognizing the burdens of judgement implies the acceptance of the fact that even among reasonable agents, there can be genuine disagreement.

As previously claimed, I maintain that the fundamental shift in the Rawlsian paradigm concerning the normative role played by the ideal of rationality and the virtue of reasonableness depends upon the recognition that political legitimacy cannot be granted as appealing solely to the rationality that individuals share, because self-interest provides agents with good reasons for reaching stability via modus vivendi, but not for the right reasons. For the right reasons involves two fundamental features, strongly related to each other and connected with the definition of the virtue of reasonableness, that, as we shall see, I argue should be understood in both moral and epistemological terms. On the one hand, agents prove to be reasonable when they accept reciprocity constraints and are therefore wiling to abide by fair terms of social cooperation provided that others do the same. Also, they should mutually respect each other’s free and equal moral status. On the other hand, citizens are reasonable, in the epistemic sense, when they accept the burdens of judgement and are able to restrain themselves from trying to impose their private perspectives when publicly debating political matters, therefore respecting the epistemic authority of the other agents. It is important to notice that the recognition of the epistemic dimension of the virtue of reasonableness can be read in different ways. One strategy mainly focuses on the rational-justification-requirement, claiming that the virtue of reasonableness imposes stringent epistemic standards on the deliberative processes of subjects. The other strategy, instead, looks at the kinds of reasons reasonable citizens are ready to introduce in public debates over political matters. Here, I defend a weaker constraint than Rawls, assuming that citizens are allowed to use private reasons in the public sphere, as long as they are able to do so while respecting other fellow citizens’ opinions and maintaining an anti-dogmatic stance. ⁵

According to the revised account I am proposing, citizens are reasonable when they meet these two criteria:

A second concern regarding the most adequate reading of the virtue of reasonableness arises when we try to specify the range of application of the reasonableness criterion. Rawls uses the term reasonable to refer to a personal attitude shown by some citizens, but he employs the very same criterion for characterizing comprehensive doctrines. According to Rawls, individuals hold different comprehensive doctrines and these doctrines can be divided into reasonable and unreasonable ones. Reasonable comprehensive doctrines are defined through a loose account (1993, 58–65):

In this way, Rawls’s theory provides standards for distinguishing between reasonable and unreasonable holders of reasonable or unreasonable comprehensive doctrines. Furthermore, Rawls claims that something else can be defined as reasonable, namely a specific form of disagreement in which reasonable citizens end up disagreeing, notwithstanding the fact that they respect each other as free and equal and are willing to abide by cooperative norms.

One of the goals of this article is to show that the criterion of reasonableness can play a fundamental normative role in characterizing the attitude of agents and in distinguishing a specific form of public disagreement. In contrast, the very same criterion should not be employed for assessing whether the comprehensive doctrines privately held by citizens are indeed reasonable or unreasonable. Although I understand the appeal of having a public criterion for weighing the consistency of comprehensive doctrines within a liberal framework – one that imposes respect for citizens as free and equal and the entry into cooperative schemes for normative and not simply instrumental reasons – I will argue that such a move nevertheless implies an unwelcome liberal-perfectionist drift to the whole political liberalism enterprise. ⁷ Even though it is true that assessing the attitude of citizens with regard to their adherence to reasonableness constraints implies an appraisal of the reasons that such citizens hold in the public arena, still I maintain that it is normatively important to draw a line between the judgement of the specific attitude shown by citizens while debating and a general attempt to assess comprehensive doctrines in terms of reasonableness. Indeed, if we look at the actual political interactions among citizens and between citizens and institutions, it appears that reasonableness is a virtue that agents hold in different degrees and the very same individual can prove to be perfectly reasonable on some issues and unreasonable on some others. Inasmuch as the category of reasonable citizen is not carved in stone once for all, it makes even less sense to assess comprehensive doctrines employing the same standard. First of all, the notion of comprehensive doctrines is in itself quite loose, since not every doctrine is comprehensive to the same degree and agents do not hold their private preferences, ideas, values and other features that compose their comprehensive doctrines all with the same strength (or the very same justificatory force). Second, the same unreasonable comprehensive doctrine can be shared by two agents who happen to diverge strongly with regard to their intersubjective attitudes, one proving to be politically reasonable and the other holding this doctrine with a fanatic and illiberal attitude towards those who disagree with her. In this instance, does it make sense to describe both agents as unreasonable citizens, since, while they both support an unreasonable doctrine, one of them does so in a reasonable manner?

In order to evaluate the rationale that moved Rawls to propose an assessment of comprehensive doctrines through the criterion of reasonableness, introducing the distinction between politically and philosophically unreasonable citizens (Kelly and McPherson 2001) may be useful. According to this distinction, it is possible to have a more stringent notion of the category of unreasonable citizen that hinges on a philosophical definition of reasonableness. In the philosophical sense, a doctrine is unreasonable because it is epistemologically weak (or plainly irrational) from the theoretical standpoint; or, also, it can be defined as unreasonable because incompatible with scientific findings widely accepted as true; or because it supports notions that are inconsistent with some moral tenets of democratic societies (a theory that defends a theory of gender hierarchy, for example). However, the very same citizens who privately support these views can still behave reasonably in the public domain meeting the requirements of political reasonableness. A politically reasonable citizen is prepared to recognize in fellow citizens the status of free and equal persons, to abide by fair terms of cooperation and to restrain herself from imposing her sectarian view on others while publicly debating. ⁸ The political notion of reasonableness is determined thanks to a narrower and strictly political standpoint.

Consistent with the goal of granting stability for the right reasons, such a political interpretation of the virtue of reasonableness seems to me more adequate, as it proves to be more inclusive. And since the realm of politics involves constant attempts to establish and maintain cooperative schemes among individuals who are in conflict, the ideal of inclusiveness is relevant. ⁹ Indeed, according to this view, a citizen can be considered politically reasonable even when she holds a philosophically unreasonable doctrine. Politically reasonable citizens are those agents who prove able to respect a compatibility requirement with ‘the greatest range of equal basic rights and liberties for all’ (Kelly and McPherson 2001, 42), regardless of whether the doctrines they privately hold can be defined as philosophically reasonable. I maintain that assessing citizens on their social attitude towards other fellow citizens and towards political institutions, rather than investigating the philosophical reasonableness of their private views is correct for both normative reasons (i.e. in order to fully respect every member of the constituency, institutions should not denigrate citizens’ deep values as theoretically weak or epistemically unjustified) and pragmatic ones (i.e. fostering deliberation, increasing the chances of reaching a stable agreement and promoting a more flexible comprehension of comprehensive doctrines exposed to public scrutiny).

In the ordinary practice of politics, democratic decisions are often the result of complex negotiation processes in which citizens are to be heard and taken into consideration, granted that they are willing to respect the institutional and legal framework that constitutes the basic ground of liberal democracies. ¹⁰ Therefore, what is relevant from the political perspective is citizens’s willingness to accept the cooperative scheme and politically respect the equal footing of any other member of the constituency. Naturally, there can be instances of philosophical unreasonableness so wide as to prevent the holders of such doctrines being able to be in any way politically reasonable (e.g. a defender of institutional racism). ¹¹ In these cases, we can speak of non-liberal and unreasonable (both politically and philosophically) members of society and in such cases containment and toleration (in cases where no violence and harm are involved) are the only solutions available. ¹²

4. The epistemic dimension of reasonableness

In the literature, much attention has been paid to different interpretations of the ethical aspects of reasonableness (Boettcher 2004; Habermas 1995; Kelly and McPherson 2001; Moore 1996; Nussbaum 2011; Quong 2011). Lately, the epistemic dimension of this virtue has started to be debated more thoroughly as well (Liveriero 2015; Estlund 2008; Peter 2013; Wall 2014). I maintain that providing a specific epistemic interpretation of the reciprocity and the public reason constraints is relevant, because there are specific aspects of the virtue of reasonableness that cannot be fully grasped by looking solely at the ethical dimension of this virtue. In order to develop this analysis, it is important to clarify the epistemic relevance of the burdens of judgement expounded by Rawls in PL (1993, 56–57). In brief, the burdens of judgement express the following epistemic aspects of our social life: (a) the intrinsic complexity of evidence and the opaque and always mediated appraisal single individuals make of such evidence; (b) the different orderings and priorities in moral and factual statements given the employment of different systems of epistemic norms by agents; (c) the vagueness of all concepts, and in particular moral ones; (d) the path dependency of our belief formation from our personal histories and social roles and contexts; (e–f) the constant risk of indeterminacy and the difficulties of reaching an intersubjective agreement, given the fallibility of our epistemic capacities and our dependence on agent-relative reasons.

The analysis of the burdens of judgement, if spelled out technically (looking at the epistemological conclusions more thoroughly than Rawls did), sheds light on our limited cognitive capacities qua fallible human beings. First, the burdens of judgement suggest that, when debating complex evidence, it is highly unlikely – if not impossible – that any agent can claim a full appraisal of the evidence at stake, since evaluative beliefs and epistemic norms are always involved in the deliberation (Feldman 2002; Goldman 2010). The appraisal of evidence is also often a social and diachronically oriented process (Sosa 2010), as it is quite impossible that a single agent might actually attain full apprehension of a specific piece of evidence. Second, and most importantly, starting from the acknowledgment of the limited epistemic capacities of humans to attain full apprehension of evidence, it is then possible to draw some epistemic conclusions in favour of a fallibilist account of practical knowledge. ¹³ Third, the burdens of judgement explain in epistemic terms the existence of genuine reasonable disagreement, showing that even reasonable epistemic agents can end up disagreeing over fundamental values (Peter 2016, 2019). ¹⁴

These conclusions are consistent with many suppositions debated within the literature concerning the epistemology of disagreement (Christensen and Lackey 2013; Enoch 2011; Kelly 2005; Simpson 2013). Theorists diverge in defining what is the more correct agent’s epistemic response to the fact that she is disagreeing in a qualified manner with an epistemic peer. However, there is ample convergence on the assumption that epistemic agents can genuinely disagree, even when epistemic and informational constraints are actually met. In this article, I do not want to investigate this literature on the epistemology of disagreement specifically. Yet I think that some theoretical findings can be drawn from this debate that are helpful in clarifying the epistemic dimension of the virtue of reasonableness. Indeed, once it is established that genuine disagreement is a quite common outcome of public deliberations among reasonable citizens, it derives from it that reasonable citizens have good epistemic (and normative) reasons to at least acknowledge the fact that the public solution for the conflict between two political decisions (e.g. decision A grounded in the belief that p and decision B grounded in the belief that ∼p) is underdetermined from the epistemological perspective. This means that every time that a reasonable citizen strongly disagrees with some fellow citizens and an appeal to an external epistemic authority (whose authority all recognize as legitimate to resolve the conflict) is not available (this is very often the case when evaluative matters are at stake), this citizen should acknowledge that she does not possess conclusive epistemic reasons for assuming that her belief that p is necessarily true and for dismissing the belief that ∼p as utterly wrong. Since it is not possible to establish once and for all who is right from the epistemic perspective, then reasonable citizens have good reasons for at least abstaining from a dogmatic attitude while debating over political issues. ¹⁵

The epistemic dimension of reasonableness, if interpreted in this way, does not impose a demanding standard of epistemic rationality on agents engaged in public deliberative processes. Rather, this reading requires reasonable citizens to undertake an attitude of epistemic modesty while deliberating public matters with agents who hold views different from theirs. ¹⁶ Granted that a minimum threshold of epistemic rationality has been drawn and reasonable citizens prove to be above such a threshold, ¹⁷ this view stresses that no citizen has the ultimate epistemic authority for establishing that her beliefs, conception of the good or political preferences should be given epistemic priority, in the face of disagreement with other citizens. Naturally, she can keep believing in the validity of her own perspective, but she should be aware that she does not have a legitimate epistemic authority for imposing her own view upon others, as long as they strongly oppose such a view. Even in the case of widely different epistemic performances, the lack of an ultimate epistemic reason in favour of A or B as publicly justifiable courses of action does not allow any reasonable citizen to impose her preference without engaging in a fair exchange with her fellow citizens. According to this account of the epistemic dimension of reasonableness, reasonable citizens are those who are aware of the limitations of humans’ doxastic activities for establishing knowledge and therefore they are ready to engage in public deliberative processes and to share epistemic authorities with their fellow citizens.

Reasonable citizens, in respecting other citizens as members of the same cooperative scheme, should ascribe them the status of free and equal and, also, must be able to respect their intellectual and evaluative autonomy. These considerations are crucial for a liberal conception of democracy, because they provide agents with epistemic reasons to recognize other participants as at least putative epistemic authorities. As I shall argue in the last section of this article, this normative requirement of respecting the political agency of my fellow citizens acknowledging their putative epistemic authority – that here I have justified referring to the nonideal (epistemic) circumstances of politics – is reflected in the necessity for liberal institutions to abstain from assessing the actual intellectual and moral abilities of each citizen.

5. Respect for persons and perfectionist liberalism

The traditional notion of reasonableness has been criticized by various authors. Specifically, in this section, I address the critiques raised by Martha Nussbaum (2011) and Steven Wall (2014). Nussbaum claims that the epistemic reading of reasonableness should be put aside, since it may lead to a liberal-perfectionist approach, that ends up discounting comprehensive doctrines that are not compatible with the epistemic paradigm of a rationalistic, scientific, liberal world view. ¹⁸ In contrast, Steven Wall criticizes the standard epistemic reading of reasonableness from the other side of the spectrum, claiming that this dimension is actually necessary (pace Nussbaum), but that it must be rephrased in a way to be actually consistent with a perfectionist and idealized view of human rationality.

Nussbaum’s critique is actually well posed if we take reasonableness as a standard to be applied towards the assessment of both citizens’ attitudes and the comprehensive doctrines they hold. I agree with her that assessing the adequacy of comprehensive doctrines through reference to theoretical standards that can never be perfectly neutral involves adopting a perfectionist stance. Indeed, sharing Nussbaum’s concerns, previously I claimed that it is not necessary (for political legitimacy concerns) to establish which comprehensive doctrines are philosophically reasonable and which are not. To briefly recall, there are both pragmatic and normative reasons in support of this approach. Since comprehensive doctrines are a loose concept, and different individuals might relate to such doctrines with different degrees of attachment or interpret the very same doctrine in quite different ways, I assume that there are pragmatic reasons that suggest the impracticability of actually assessing comprehensive doctrines through the lens of reasonableness. Furthermore, and this aspect is more relevant than the pragmatic one, I believe, in accord with Nussbaum, that a reasonableness test, if applied to the assessment of comprehensive doctrines, might end up producing perfectionist and anti-liberal outcomes, imposing a specific world view as a standard to attune to in order for a comprehensive doctrine to be considered reasonable. Also, the respect and the equal footing that is due to every member of the constituency should be granted to the holders of doctrines, not be derived from the assessment of the value per se of the doctrines they happen to hold. Indeed, in a liberal domain, citizens should protect and respect each other’s autonomy and reflexive political agency, regardless of the conception of the good they privately support. ¹⁹

Even if I share some of Nussbaum’s concerns regarding the traditional account of reasonableness, I disagree with her concerning the resolution of these concerns. Nussbaum, in fact, proposes to remove any epistemic element of reasonableness, focusing just on the ethical dimension of this virtue. As should be clear, I defend the opposite strategy: I maintain that the epistemic aspects of reasonableness should be properly clarified and highlighted, as they involve an important normative upshot regarding the kind of epistemic attitude reasonable citizens should maintain while facing deep disagreement with their fellow citizens in the attempt to reach political decisions.

Steven Wall himself has criticized Nussbaum’s proposal for a strictly ethical notion of reasonableness, but he does so while defending a perfectionist reading of reasonableness and of human rationality that it strikes me as at odds with political accounts of liberalism. Wall’s perspective involves a major critique of the political liberalism model, because Wall argues that any strictly political version of public justification would end up departing too sharply from the search for the most correct conception of justice. According to Wall, calibrating the procedures of justification towards real political constituencies, rather than focusing on the search for the most rational and epistemic tenable conception of justice is indeed the wrong strategy. Wall claims that the justificatory procedures should not be constrained by the search for legitimacy (i.e. the actual support that real citizens demonstrate in favour of a specific conception of justice publicly established). ²⁰

Wall criticizes the overall justificatory strategy employed by political liberalism, because he believes that political liberalism focuses too much on the issue of reaching stability for the right reasons – concentrating on how to assure the actual acceptance of principles by real citizens – and not enough on the normative attempt to justify the ideal acceptability of such principles, thanks to the reference to good epistemic reasons. Wall, contra Nussbaum, argues that abandoning the epistemic aspects of reasonableness altogether would imply an unwelcome normative loss, reducing the justificatory scope of liberalism to the search for an actual acceptance of political principles by real citizens, regardless of the good normative reasons that can be adduced in favour of the political conception itself. Indeed, the argument goes, if the epistemic criteria of acceptability are drawn only from common sense, rather than established through an adequate epistemological analysis, then it is impossible to prevent the collapse of the normative arguments for acceptability over the quest for actual acceptance (for a similar line of argument, see Habermas 1995). ²¹

Wall defends a perfectionist view of liberalism that is supported by an externalist conception of epistemic justification. According to this view, ‘it is possible for a person to have a reason to do something, even if there is no sound deliberative route that can take him from his current set of reasons and beliefs to the recognition that he has the reason in question’ (Wall 2010, 126). Following externalism of reasons, Wall claims that being reasonable, both from an ethical and epistemological perspective, implies acknowledging the intrinsic normativity attached to the concept of individual rationality and being able to respect the requirement of not rejecting a reason that it is actually a reason for me, notwithstanding the fact I might not recognize it from my internal perspective. According to this account, an agent is epistemically unreasonable when she rejects a particular conception of justice for bad epistemic reasons (Wall 2014, 471).

Wall characterizes reasonableness as the epistemic virtue of being able to acknowledge that there are reasons that we – as epistemic agents – cannot reasonably reject. I take this epistemic account of reasonableness defended by Wall to be epistemically burdensome and normatively problematic. First of all, his notion of epistemic reasonableness, depending upon an externalist view of reasons, is at odds with the fallibilistic account of humans’ epistemic abilities that I defended in section 4. Second, this externalist view about reasons hints to a notion of respect for persons that risks leading to forms of paternalistic disrespect. Wall is well aware that perfectionist accounts of liberalism have been criticized for treating citizens’ disrespectfully. He therefore proposes a different account of respect for persons that:

should acknowledge that persons, understood as rational agents, have the rational capacity to revise or abandon any commitment they have, even if it is very unlikely that they will do so. Put otherwise, respecting persons requires us to view them as beings who are not stuck with their commitments, but rather as beings that have the capacity to assess, and if called for to revise or abandon, their commitments in response to the reasons for having them. A view of reasonableness that includes epistemic as well as ethical elements can take proper account of this aspect of respect for persons. (Wall 2014, 478)

Even though I share some insights of Wall’s analysis, namely the claim that ‘an adequate account of respect for persons must make reference to epistemic elements’ (Wall 2014, 469), I disagree with him concerning his framing of political liberalism. According to Wall, a model of political legitimacy that defends a strong inclusiveness requirement for citizens’ opinions and doxastic reasons tends to obstruct the realization of justice and let go of the search for the objectively correct conception of justice. Consistent with my account of reasonableness as a virtue of citizenship rather than as a criterion for assessing comprehensive doctrines and doxastic reasons per se, I defend a view of political legitimacy in which the stability for the right reasons constraint is no less relevant than the philosophical constraint. In this regard, I do not believe that it is possible to fully respect every citizen (and their autonomy) if we do not look for a balance between considerations of legitimacy on the one hand, and the search for justice on the other. In contrast, Wall criticizes such a strategy, claiming that the justificatory arguments should not be constrained by the search for actual legitimacy and stability. In this conclusion lies the fundamental perfectionist drive of his position.

This section was devoted to differentiating my own proposal from Nussbaum’s and Wall’s regarding the concept of reasonableness. First, pace Nussbaum, I argued that the concept of reasonableness cannot be defined in a purely ethical sense, as there are specific epistemic features to be taken into consideration. Second, contra Wall, I emphasized some difficulties that perfectionist versions of liberalism encounter in granting political respect to every member of the constituency, reasonable or unreasonable though they might be. Indeed, my proposal specifies the epistemic dimension of reasonableness in a way that is fundamentally different from Wall’s account and that relates to the liberal-democratic requirement to respect each member of the constituency no matter what her actual intellectual and moral characteristics may be. In the next and last section, my goal is to characterize this political ideal of mutual respect in a more technical way, referring to the literature concerning the notion of recognition respect.

6. Respecting citizens for who they are: Political agency and opacity respect

In the last section of the article, my goal is to link my account of the virtue of reasonableness with a specific reading of the notion of equal respect within the political domain. The heart of this proposal is that, given the nonideal epistemic circumstances of politics (i.e. doxastic presupposition; opaque appraisal of evidence; social and diachronic aspects of epistemic processes), the normative promise of democracy to grant equal respect to any participant in the decision-making process can be expressed in epistemic terms claiming that participants in collective decision-making processes should acknowledge each other’s status as putative epistemic authorities. Here I move from two premises: first, that a well-functioning democracy must allow citizens to fight for the recognition of their own interests and rights; second, that the epistemic circumstances of real-world democracies are such that claims of knowledge, interests and rights are inevitably contested. Moving from these two premises, I hold that in a functioning democracy the acknowledgment of the status of putative epistemic authority derives its value from a normative account of political agency according to which citizens, that should be treated on an equal footing and seen as capable of reasoning powers, are the co-authors of democratic decisions.

This normative framework refers to two fundamental aspects of the notion of political agency in democratic contexts: the first is the proceduralist tenet that equality is a non-instrumental value according to which every member of the constituency should be acknowledged as a political actor and any voice, in the political arena, should be given equal weight. The second hinges on the acknowledgement that reasonable disagreement is a likely outcome of collective-decision frameworks and that, therefore, reasonable citizens, in accepting the limits of their epistemic abilities, should be ready to share political and epistemic authority with their fellow citizens. This second aspect of the characterization of democratic political agency is grounded in the analysis of the epistemic circumstances of politics I outlined before. According to my account, reasonable agents are those agents willing to abide by a democratic epistemic ethos that requires them to regard fellow citizens as putative epistemic authorities even when epistemic performances are actually different in quality. When challenged by disagreement with a others, reasonable citizens are required – for both moral and epistemic reasons – to avoid any dogmatic attitudes concerning full confidence in their own beliefs and to be tolerant of the views of others.

As the last argument of this article, I want to investigate whether my account of reasonableness can provide fruitful insights concerning the political notion of respect for persons. Both Nussbaum and Wall, correctly, relate the debate concerning the social virtue of reasonableness with a general discussion about political legitimacy and justification as well as with the normative requirement of granting equal respect to every member of the constituency. I have already addressed Nussbaum’s concerns regarding possible disrespectful outcomes of the use of the notion of reasonableness for characterizing comprehensive doctrines. Now it is time to analyse the adequacy of Wall’s account of respect for persons. Wall’s perfectionist view is compelling if and only if one is ready to accept his account of respect for persons. To recall, his notion of respect stresses the fact that we have to look at an ideal standard of rationality, respecting persons for what they should be and for the reasons they should have, rather than for the reasons they happen to hold. Consistent with an externalist account of reasons, Wall claims that we show full respect for a person when we treat her by applying the highest rationality standard available. ²² My reply to this proposal is that this notion of respect for persons, appealing to a very demanding account of epistemic rationality and responsibility, is incompatible with the nonidealized circumstances of politics.

In order to demonstrate why Wall’s account of respect is inadequate inasmuch as it is too demanding, at least for the political dimension, it is important to recall a very well-known distinction between recognition respect and appraisal respect (Darwall 1977). Recognition respect is attributed in virtue of the recognition of others as persons, hence it is ascribed by default, being independent of the evaluation of the actions, deliberative processes and characters of individuals. In this regard, recognition respect is a priori and unconditional and it does not admit of degrees. In contrast, appraisal respect expresses the positive consideration of the deeds, achievements and character of a person; hence it is a posteriori, conditional on actual conduct and comes in degrees. In my opinion, the notion of respect for persons defended by Wall can be accounted for as a form of appraisal respect, rather than recognition respect. In the daily life of our personal exchanges with other individuals, we often assess and appraise individuals and esteem or reprimand them accordingly. Assessing the ability of a person to reason according to a high standard of rationality is certainly relevant for granting appraisal respect to someone. Yet, the liberal-democratic framework requires us to recognize that the status of being free and equal applies to any member of the constituency, independently of her personal achievements, character flaws or rational abilities. In a democracy, every citizen should be fully respected qua agent, referring to the status of the person as such, regardless of their specific merits or demerits. Therefore, the kind of respect that is due to any citizen is a form of recognition respect, rather than appraisal respect (Carter 2011; Galeotti 2011).

Wall’s notion of respect for persons is a fundamental notion to assess interpersonal relationships and the personal level, but I claim that this is not an adequate account of respect in the political realm, where public institutions are involved and where the recognition of political agency of every citizen should be granted on equal grounds. It is worth recalling that according to the notion of liberal legitimacy, a political cooperative scheme is legitimated if and only if a publicity constraint is respected and every individual has the same chances to impact the political processes and to be heard in the public arena. The requirement of respecting the agential capacities and autonomy of each member of the constituency is reflected in the ideal that citizens are co-authors of democratic decisions. This conclusion is indeed consistent with my previous claim that in the context of deep disagreement, reasonable citizens are those ready to engage in deliberative processes with an anti-dogmatic attitude and to acknowledge at least a minimal level of practical and epistemic authority to the agents they are debating with.

In the literature, the claim that recognition respect is the most adequate notion of respect within the framework of democratic-liberal societies has been grounded referring to the moral basis of political equality (i.e. human dignity; personhood; etc.). I maintain that a further argument in support of such a notion of respect can be drawn from the analysis of the epistemic dimension of the virtue of reasonableness I have provided in this work. Indeed, the normative requirement that reasonable citizens should ascribe the status of epistemic putative authority to each other appeals to the democratic ideal of granting everybody the default position of equal respect without first requiring the demos to assess the actual cognitive, moral and practical abilities of each citizen. More specifically, in order to grant full membership in the cooperative scheme to each citizen, the ideal of equal respect should be instantiated at the institutional level in the democratic requirement of ‘institutional blindness’ with regard to the possible assessment of the actual cognitive, moral and practical capacities of each citizen. I believe that the notion of opacity respect best captures this requirement of abstaining from assessing each citizen on the merit of her personal capacities, attitudes, flaws, shortcomings and so on out of respect for their ascribed reflexive political agency. Opacity respect (Carter 2011) is a notion of respect according to which the recognition respect that is owed to individuals is expressed by the idea that we have to treat them as ‘opaque’, without engaging in an assessment of their personal merits and faults, but simply respecting them as on an equal footing with us. The use of opacity respect is specifically essential when dealing with interpersonal exchanges at the public and political level. ²³ It follows from this argument that in a democratic context citizens should be treated and publicly recognized as equally in possession of the relevant epistemic properties, notwithstanding the fact that they are not actually equally competent (Ottonelli 2012). Granted that individuals reach a minimal threshold of epistemic capacities (that can be envisioned in terms of the basic capacities required to be granted the right to vote), then the opacity requirement kicks in, and an assessment of the specific epistemic capacities of each member of the constituency is not required, as this will imply evaluations that concern appraisal respect, rather than recognition respect. Again, it makes complete sense that agents evaluate the epistemic abilities of agents they are debating with. However, this evaluation exceeds the limits of the political domain, introducing evaluative features of appraisal respect that are very important for personal relationships, but that are in a way disrespectful if employed in the public domain – and especially if conducted by political institutions with regard to the assessment of citizens’ epistemic qualifications and moral attitudes.

To conclude, the revised account of reasonableness I defended in this article characterizes this virtue as an essential aspect of the ideal of democratic citizenship, as reasonable citizens are those that are able to be motivated by reciprocity constraints as well as respect the epistemic autonomy of the other members of cooperative schemes. This specification of the virtue of reasonableness is compatible with different models of political legitimacy, since it is possible to interpret the public reason constraint in stricter or weaker ways. However, I argued that my version of the virtue of reasonableness is clearly at odds with a perfectionist account of liberalism and it requires that both the moral and epistemic aspects of this virtue are clearly explained. Finally, I showed that reasonableness as a virtue of liberal citizenship has implications for how we respond to the nonideal epistemic circumstances that are typical of democratic life. In particular, reasonable citizens would, in such circumstances, mutually recognize each other as co-authors of political decisions, meeting the normative demand to treat persons as opaque and to ascribe to them the default status of putative epistemic and practical authorities.