The Sectarian Conundrum of Political Liberalism (Part 1)

Why Establishing that Reasonable Persons Can Agree Is Not Enough

This is the first of a series of posts about the “sectarian conundrum”. A second post will follow. More may be to come later.

The so-called “paradox of tolerance” is a well-known issue that surfaces as soon as one grants the value of freedom outstanding importance in one’s moral system. Karl Popper famously identified it in a footnote to chapter 7 of The Open Society and Its Enemies:[1]

“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”

Versions of this paradox keep on surfacing in liberal thought. It is appearing again, under a distinctively different shape, in recent debates internal to political liberalism. Rather than tolerance or intolerance, the issue bends toward to which degree a society organized based on a liberal political morality can avoid being sectarian at some point. Sectarianism here refers to the fact that a subset of the members of society may consider having conclusive reasons to reject the values and beliefs of another subset of members of the liberal society as reasons justifying coercive laws and social rules (or their rejection). The problem posed by sectarianism is particularly acute in public reason liberalism, a specific brand of political liberalism, that builds on the principle that coercive laws are legitimate if and only if they are justified based on reasons that everyone could (reasonably) share/endorse/agree on.[2] Sectarianism seems indeed to go against the principle of public justification. A sectarian society excludes by definition some of its members from the scope of public reason, thus threatening the legitimacy of coercive laws. Let me call this the Sectarian Conundrum of Political Liberalism.

Sectarian Conundrum of Political Liberalism. According to political liberalism, legitimacy depends on the public justification of laws and rules. But a liberal society may need to be sectarian, i.e., to restrict the requirement of public justification to only a subset of the population. In this case, laws and rules can never be fully legitimate.     

The sectarian conundrum from the paradox of tolerance is at least at two levels. First, it is not a paradox in the logical sense. It just describes a conflict between the requirement of public justification and other normatively relevant considerations that may demand a restriction of public reason. Second, tolerance is somehow weaker than public justification. To tolerate someone’s way of life only means that we do not interfere and make it impossible for them to live as they wish. But while I can tolerate, say, that you wear specific clothes because of your commitment to some religious belief, that does not mean that I must accept that this belief can serve as a proper reason to justify a law forbidding any restriction on the kind of clothes that can be worn in specific circumstances. That a group of persons N tolerates that someone does x for reason R does not entail that the members of N consider that R justifies that everyone should be permitted to do x. Tolerance can be regarded as an exemption to the requirement of public justification that is “generously” granted to a minority. Hence, a liberal society can be tolerant while being at the same time sectarian.

What is the kind of consideration that can account for the need to bypass the requirement of public justification? Within political liberalism, these are in general concerns about stability. If too many sorts of reasons are allowed to enter into the scope of public justification, then any possibility of consensus about rules and principles will be jeopardized. Even if an agreement is established, it is likely that many persons will feel justified in infringing on it. This kind of concern is obvious in John Rawls’s version of political liberalism. Rawls was careful to restrict the requirement of public justification to reasonable persons, i.e., persons whose “comprehensive doctrines” are compatible with public reasons justifying liberal principles of justice. This notoriously leads to serious conceptual and substantive difficulties for Rawls’s account. In particular, some kind of vicious circularity is lurking. To identify the publicly justified principles of justice, we need first to determine who the “members of the public” are, i.e., to whom justification must be addressed. But in turn, because only reasonable persons can be members of the public, we need to know what the principles of justice are to establish whether a person is reasonable, i.e., whether her conception of the good is compatible with these principles.

Some Rawlsian political philosophers have displayed admirable ingenuity to overcome these kinds of difficulties while preserving Rawls’s framework. The most significant attempt is probably Johnathan Quong’s “internal conception” of political liberalism.[3] Quong’s basic and key claim is that public justification is a requirement internal to liberal philosophy. It follows that it holds only for persons who as a matter of fact endorse liberal justice principles. Others are outside the scope of public justification. The most important implication is that the overlapping consensus, which in Rawls’s political liberalism corresponds to the second stage of public justification,[4] becomes the starting point of the justificatory endeavor in Quong’s account. The question asked is the following: what do citizens living in a Rawlsian well-ordered society would agree on in terms of liberal conceptions of justice? Note that the question is not asked of any kind of citizen. Only those that are reasonable in the Rawlsian sense of accepting the postulate that they are all free and equal qualify. These are the citizens who possess the two moral powers identified by Rawls (the capacity to have and behave according to a conception of the good and the capacity for a sense of justice) and who recognize that others have the same powers. Hence, the overlapping consensus de facto excludes citizens who refuse to ascribe to others these moral powers and therefore reject the moral implications they generate. Once the overlapping consensus is established and the set of liberal principles of justice determined, public reason arbitrates between competing liberal conceptions. Public reason thus defines the deliberative framework within which disagreement about justice can be settled, making sure that only reasons that can ground public justification of laws are used.

In a recent and very interesting paper, Kevin Vallier and Ryan Muldoon characterize Quong’s account as a “coherence view” of public reason.[5] In essence, what Quong is establishing (or trying to establish) is an existence result: it exists a set of conditions such as a well-ordered society is possible, a society where reasonable persons behave according to just principles. This shows that the fundamental commitments of political liberalism are consistent, they “fit together”. Though it departs from Rawls’s original account, Quong’s version of political liberalism is authentically Rawlsian in its objective of demonstrating the possibility of well-ordered liberal democracies.

But what about the sectarian conundrum? It can be said that the internal conception of political liberalism is biting the bullet here. If the requirements of justification and stability imply sectarianism, we have to live with it. Indeed, Quong denies elsewhere that sectarianism is an issue.[6] But is it really not? The problem is that this approach gives absolutely no clue about how public justification can proceed in liberal societies that are not well-ordered, that is, all contemporary liberal democracies. In those societies, not all citizens are reasonable. For the most extreme cases, liberal societies have settled (with difficulties) on procedures to deal with people who entertain radically unacceptable views. As an early proponent of political liberalism has famously argued, “What do you say to an Adolf Hitler? The answer is nothing. You shoot him.”[7] But not every dissenter in liberal societies is Adolph Hitler. What do you do with citizens who advance religious reasons to ask for exemptions with respect to laws that are supposed to apply to everyone? What do you do with citizens who, for reasons related to beliefs about past injustices or controversial views about gender, attempt to silence others with whom they disagree? What do you do with persons who protest against economic policies that, according to them, treat them unfairly, based on illiberal considerations?

The sectarian conundrum is thus not easy to neutralize. In the second part, I will discuss a radically different approach, the diversity view, that, while still belonging to the public reason and political liberalism research program, provides a radically different solution. As we shall see, while probably an improvement over the internal conception of political liberalism, it also faces serious difficulties.  

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[1] Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 5^th edition (London: Routledge, 2011 [1945]), p. 581.

[2] There are several variants of public reason liberalism that distinguish themselves based on the kind of requirement for the publicity condition to be satisfied. Also, while the public justification requirement may only apply as a condition of the legitimacy of coercive laws, it can sometimes be extended to characterize the genuine morality of social rules concerned with moral matters.

[3] Jonathan Quong, Liberalism without Perfection (Oxford ; New York: OUP Oxford, 2010).

[4] More specifically, it is the stage of “full justification”, that comes after the “pro tanto” justification of principles of justice achieved within the original position.

[5] Kevin Vallier and Ryan Muldoon, “In Public Reason, Diversity Trumps Coherence,” Journal of Political Philosophy 29, no. 2 (2021): 211–30.

[6] Jonathan Quong, “Liberalism Without Perfection: Replies to Gaus, Colburn, Chan, and Bocchiola,” Philosophy and Public Issues - Filosofia E Questioni Pubbliche 2, no. 1 (2012): 51–79.

[7] Dreben Burton, "On Rawls and Political Liberalism." In The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, edited by Samuel Freeman (2003), p. 329.