Introduction

What does it mean to act ‘reasonably’ and why is it important (or necessary) to behave in such a manner? Though such questions have for centuries captured the attention and exercised the energies of philosophers, they have possessed particular importance for liberal philosophers. Indeed, it has been argued that the idea of ‘public reasonableness is at the centre of liberalism’ (Moore 1996, p. 167; see also, for example, Macedo 2000). Liberals' fascination with reasonableness is a consequence of their desire to establish and sustain the socio-political conditions essential to a just and stable society. Liberalism was originally developed as a means by which to secure political stability in societies in which the presence of religious pluralism had produced years of repression, persecution, and civil war. The violent, deadly, and destabilising conflict that arose in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Europe as a result of the public intolerance of religious diversity brought with it the realisation that a new approach to responding to doctrinal disagreement was necessary if one wished to avoid such conflict in the future and provide for the type of peaceful coexistence needed to ensure political stability in pluralistic societies.