Political Liberalism's Problem of Collective Reasoning

In Political Liberalism John Rawls argues for citizens to appeal to public reason in their political decision-making. Each individual citizen should make decisions he or she believes all other reasonable citizens will accept. But even if public reason motives the decision-making of every citizen, Rawls realises that unanimous agreement on fundamental issues are unlikely. He therefore accepts the need for majority voting. His theory consequently becomes vulnerable to problems of aggregation procedures. One such problem is the discursive dilemma (List and Pettit 2011), according to which there no majority-voting procedure is guaranteed to support both the premises on which a decision rests and the decision itself. This paper shows how the discursive dilemma is particularly problematic for Rawls's political liberalism. Motivated by public reasons, the majority of citizens might make decisions based on reasons the majority rejects. And the majority might reject decisions while endorsing the reasons from which they logically follow. The paper considers decision-making procedures that can guarantee outcomes supported by the majority's view of public reason, and thus solve the problem.