Liberals have had much to say about the kinds of reasons that democratic citizens should offer one another when they engage in public political debates about existing or proposed laws. One of the more notable claims is that citizens should (at least in the last instance) rely only public reasons when persuading one another to support or oppose a given law or policy. In this paper I question that requirement and suggest that the moral obligation not to explain their support for exiting or proposed laws on the basis of comprehensive alone does not apply to most citizens most of the time. I suggest that for most (ordinary) citizens no such obligation exists and that individuals are entitled to explain their support for a specific law and to persuade others of the merits of that law on the basis of comprehensive reasons alone (though there may be sound prudential reasons for not doing so). My argument is grounded in the claim that once we take note of the context in which citizens address one another, then we will find that in most instances advocating laws on the basis of comprehensive reasons alone is consistent with the moral requirement that citizens treat one another with equal respect. I acknowledge an important exception to that claim is to be found when using comprehensive reasons to justify a law also implies that the state endorses those reasons. For this reason I argue that there is a moral obligation for some (publicly influential) citizens, and especially those who hold public office, to refrain from explaining their support for existing or proposed laws on the basis of their own comprehensive reasons. I conclude by suggesting that this understanding of the role of comprehensive reasons in public political discourse and the obligations of democratic citizens is a better reflection of our experience of democratic citizenship than that given in some well-know accounts of liberalism (including Rawls’).
