Animals and Public Reason

Defenses of public reason are rarely framed in terms of particular issues. This is less than satisfactory state of affairs. Not only are we deprived of particular analyses of individual issues and how public reason would ask that we conduct our conversations about them, the failure to address particular cases arguably goes against Rawls’s broader methodology of “reflective equilibrium,” In this essay, I want to do just such an analysis of a particular issue, and use this as a way both of defending public reason, and also suggesting some modifications to how we should think of public reason as applied to a particulat issue. The issue I look at is animal rights, an issue that is certainly controversial. Moreover, Rawls does spend some time, about two pages, on the issue in Political Liberalism in his chapter on public reason. But his discussion has not received much in the way of scholarly attention. What Rawls says is admittedly compressed, but not for that reason wholly unpersuasive or uninteresting. Although I ultimately disagree with Rawls’s conclusion about animal rights and public reason (he claims the rights of animals is a topic outside of public reason; I disagree), I hope to, in a larger sense, vindicate the idea of public reason. The constraints that public reason places on how we talk about animal rights are the correct ones for a pluralistic society. In turn, I will suggest that this conclusion gives us additional reason to find the idea of public reason attractive.