Two Conceptions of (Un-)reasonableness

Current social analyses diagnose a crisis of democracy, evident in phenomena like polarisation or rising authoritarianism. Political theories, e.g. the discourse theory (Habermas) or political liberalism (Rawls), reconstructively identify deliberative learning as a means of addressing crises of social integration. However, the social conditions under which such learning can occur have increasingly deteriorated, largely due to transformations in media and communication technologies that foster fragmented public spheres and epistemic echo chambers. While recent social research has primarily focused on institutional responses to these developments, stable liberal democracies depend not only on robust institutional design but also on citizens’ willingness to comply with democratic duties and virtues beyond formal constraints. This raises pressing normative questions concerning the justification and specification of such duties. Within deliberative theories of democracy in the broadest sense, there is a conceptual consensus that citizens can be said to be behaving unreasonably if and only if they deliberately violate democratic standards. According to this understanding, someone would be acting unreasonably, for example, if they were to prima facie place their own interests above the common good in the public decision-making process. This Rousseauian conception of public unreasonableness, however, inadequately captures contemporary forms of democratic erosion caused by the structural changes in today’s public sphere. In many cases, citizens engage in apparently anti-democratic actions not out of principled rejection of democratic norms, but because of false or distorted empirical beliefs. For example, let us assume that Trump’s supporters who stormed the Capitol believed the Democratic Party had indeed stolen the election. Then, their actions might be framed as a Benjaminian act of democratic resistance. When actors like in this case perceive themselves as truly defending democracy against an illegitimate threat, unreasonableness arises less from motivational deficits than from failures to meet epistemic duties, such as the obligation to rely on trustworthy and independent sources of information. Against this background, this paper develops a distinction between two forms of public unreasonableness through a critical engagement with Rawls' political liberalism, whose account of public reason largely neglects epistemic dimensions. By differentiating between practical and epistemic unreasonableness, the paper aims to provide a more precise conceptual framework for understanding contemporary anti-democratic practices and to offer a more nuanced normative evaluation of democratic responsibility under conditions of epistemic fragmentation. Finally, drawing on the discussion of intellectual honesty in normative epistemology (Tugendhat), the paper illustrates how epistemic democratic virtues or duties might be conceptualized.