Social Theory and Practice

Volume 50, Issue 2, April 2024

Collectivizing Public Reason

Public reason liberals expect individuals to have justificatory reasons for their views of certain political issues. This paper considers how groups can, and whether they should, give collective public reasons for their political decisions. A problem is that aggregating individuals’ consistent judgments on reasons and a decision can produce inconsistent collective judgments. The group will then fail to give a reason for its decision. The paper considers various solutions to this problem and defends a deliberative procedure by showing how it incentivizes information sharing and leads to outcomes most acceptable to the group members.