The duty of mutual respect as the deliberative duty of democratic citizenship

Rawls’s conception of public reason is discussed by the current philosophical debate exclusively with reference to his late work like notably Political Liberalism. In that, Rawls conceptualises reasonable justifications as shareable regarding their reasons. Consequently, citizens are called upon, at least in the long run, to replace their formerly held reasons derived from their personal comprehensive doctrines with generally shareable ones. Only these new reasons shall then be capable of justifying democratically legitimate norms. Yet, critics such as Jürgen Habermas argue that the requirement that citizens replace their subjective reasons with generally shareable ones is overburdened, particularly for the context of diverse societies. To be specific, the consequence would be that citizens were forced to split their identities into a private and public one and then publicly engage in dishonest communication while accepting cognitive dissonance. Rawls’s work can only escape this accusation by assuming that citizens of democratic societies practice self-censorship and give each other generally shareable reasons because they interpret this as a requirement of their comprehensive doctrines as well. However, this is a highly dubious auxiliary hypothesis, which Rawls’s theory of democracy draws on, accepting cultural relativism. Yet, without explicitly mentioning the concept, the Theory of Justice contains an earlier conception of public reason, which differs from that found in Rawls’s late work in two respects: On the one hand, it differentiates between the acceptance of reasons in terms of their divisibility of content and in terms of their consequences, whereby public reasons are to be assessed in terms of their consequence. On the other hand, this conception of public reason does not imme-diately require virtuous citizens to replace their reasons taken from their comprehensive doctrines, but only to deliberate whether they can find acceptance in terms of their consequences. The aim of this text is to take the position that this early conception of public reasons and the corresponding deliberative duty, even if it may sound anachronistic from a biographical point of view, is better suited for deliberation under pluralistic conditions. Furthermore, this shall be exemplified with regard to the special case of religious diversity.