ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to show how citizens can respond to incompleteness without sacrificing the weighty moral and political values that support their commitment to public justification. It distinguishes between two types of incompleteness. Public reason might be incomplete either because it fails to bring citizens into agreement about how to decide an issue, or because it does not provide sufficient reason(s) to make a decision in the first place. The chapter argues that the inconclusiveness of public reason is a permanent feature of liberal politics. It addresses a particular objection to public reason as Part of an effort to develop a stronger and more sophisticated conception of public justification. The chapter argues that citizens can employ a range of second-order decision-making strategies to cope with various forms of incompleteness. It concludes that citizens should rarely, if ever, appeal solely to their comprehensive doctrines for the purpose of political justification.
