Public justification and moral emotions: sufficient reasons and the role of non-deontic reactive attitudes

Gerald Gaus argues that public justification is a deep presupposition of social morality and consequently of the political. However, public justification as such is not self-evident. Gaus argues that the public justification principle is grounded in Strawsonian reactive attitudes. In short, Gaus says, the reason why we follow the public justification principle is that we feel reactive attitudes towards those who violate moral rules within social morality. Accordingly, Gaus claims that reactive attitudes cannot be renounced, nor they need justification. The explanation of public justification by means of reactive attitudes has drawn criticism from some authors. Tahzib, for instance, rejects that reactive attitudes cannot be renounced. At the same time, together with Taylor, he criticizes Gaus’s sufficiency of reasons condition. Specifically, Gaus claims that reactive attitudes are appropriate only towards those rule-violators a) who are capable of caring for moral rules and b) who have sufficient reasons to internalize the moral rule. As a result, we are entitled to feel reactive attitudes only towards the person who has sufficient reasons to internalize moral rules, but she violates them, nonetheless. Tahzib and Taylor, however, point out the problematic consequences of the sufficiency of reasons condition, which questions the legitimacy of reactive attitudes in case of rationalized evil: if Goebbels finds, after a respectable amount of deliberation, that he sees no sufficient reason to refrain from his actions, our reactive attitudes to such actions are inappropriate. In this paper, I elaborate on Tahzib and Taylor’s criticism of the reactive attitude’s approach to public justification. Specifically, the paper is divided into two parts that I call rationalistic and intuitionistic. In the rationalistic part, I discuss the sufficiency reasons condition and analyze whether Taylor’s alternative, namely the susceptibility to reasons condition, responds to the problem of rationalized evil. I argue that we are largely running into a dispute between externalist and internalist account to having reasons. In the intuitionistic part of the paper, I point out a more complex character of moral emotions that include not only will-to-will reactive attitudes (such as resentment, indignation, or blame) based on common authority and accountability, but also heart-to-heart relations (such as sorrow, compassion and also love) that do not give rise to obligations. I consequently analyze what is the role of the latter in social morality and how it affects public justification.