ABSTRACT

A civic people are constituted by citizens’ “shared policy” to decide fundamental political questions by means of public reasons. Citizens committed to the ideal of shared political autonomy should endorse the civic people account of public reason. Citizens should be committed to interacting with one another on the basis of civic respect so that they all can enjoy and exercise full political autonomy. According to the constrained proceduralist account, citizens share a policy to decide fundamental political questions through fair democratic procedures but such decisions are “constrained” by the equal protection of the basic liberal democratic rights of all. In recent years, Gerald Gaus and Kevin Vallier have advanced a “convergence” account of public justification as an alternative to Rawlsian public reason. A reason why citizens should endorse the ideal of full political autonomy concerns John Rawls’s characterization of the political relation that obtains among citizens who share a commitment to public reason as “one of civic friendship”.