So-called consensus theories of public reason liberalism hold that the public justifications offered to citizens for coercive laws must be devoid of reasonably-rejectable philosophical content, such as, paradigmatically, claims about the metaphysics of personal identity. Some critics of consensus theories, meanwhile, argue that, without recourse to the facts about personal identity, many fundamental political problems will prove insoluble. This paper examines whether consensus liberalism’s insistence on neutrality in public justification over personal identity is sustainable. I defend the claim that the personal identity relation is not in itself of moral significance (nor therefore of significance to political morality specifically). But this fact, I also argue, is insufficient to vindicate consensus liberalism, since the facts and relations that are of moral and political relevance, in lieu of identity, will often be ones from which standard articulations of the consensus view would likewise prohibit public appeal.
