Unreasonable People and Democracy

Abstract On Rawls’s definition, unreasonable persons deny at least one of three political ideas that are crucial in his theory of political liberalism: the idea of persons as free and equal, that of society as a fair system of cooperation, and the burdens of judgment. This chapter examines the role that should then be assigned to unreasonable persons within the democratic process by zooming in on two crucial issues. First, the chapter focuses on the exclusion of the unreasonable from the constituency of public reason or, in other words, the audience fundamental political decisions must be justified to. Faced with the challenge that this exclusion seems inherently illiberal, the authors reconstruct how Rawlsian political liberals explore different kinds of normative ground to justify it. Also, they argue that the explicitly sectarian nature of Rawlsian political liberalism is a strength, not a weakness, when it comes to comparing it to prominent alternatives like convergence public reason liberalism. Second, the chapter turns to Rawls’s claim that unreasonable persons must be contained if they gain too much traction in society. Although Rawls does not explain what containment should entail, Rawlsian scholars have argued for both “militant” measures like rights restrictions and “soft” interventions like discursive engagement with the unreasonable. The chapter critically analyzes this emerging scholarship.