Landfills and Justice Political Arguments, Their Justification, and Liberal Theory

In this chapter, I want to investigate the relationship between ground-level political arguments and the more abstract political theory o f the previous chapters. I am interested in seeing how we might understand actual political arguments-public reason in practice-about specific issues as reflecting larger ideas about political values. I show that the Kantian job description o f public reason is a meaningful: The dispute in question here is a dispute about the fundamental values and the political direction of a polity.