ABSTRACT
Public reason holds that laws are legitimate only if there are reasons for all (reasonable) persons to accept those laws. This chapter explores public reason, the differences between two versions of this view—Rawlsian and Gausian public reason—reasons to accept public reason in general as well as to accept these two different versions of it. Rawlsian public reason understands reasonable persons as liberal-inclined persons. One worry about Rawlsian public reason is that its view that only reasonable persons need to be able to accept laws in order for them to be legitimate seems to betray the motivations of public reason. In contrast, Gausian public reason holds that laws are legitimate only if they can be justified to all normal persons. Gausian public reason faces problems giving a non-ad-hoc account of what makes citizens normal while simultaneously rendering some laws (rather than no laws) legitimate. One of the main objections that has been levelled at public reason in general is that it is self-defeating because reasonable people reject public reason. This chapter discusses this objection and show that resources from the discussion of the self-defeat objection to conciliationism may be useful in giving a strong response to it.
