Rossella De Bernardi

People differ widely in their eating habits. This often reflects fundamental disagreements among their conceptions of the good as these relate to health, culinary traditions, animals’ interests, and so on. How laws regulating food production, distribution, and consumption can be legitimate despite such pluralism is an important question, and we welcome Josh Milburn’s and Anne Barnhill and Matteo Bonotti’s attempts to show how public reason liberalism can help address it. However, we believe that they expect too much from public reason. First, we raise questions about Milburn’s conception of reasonableness. We show that the ability of public reason theories to support a ‘zoopolis’ will vary according to their conceptualization of the relevant justificatory constituency, or ‘reasonable’ citizens. Secondly, we criticize Barnhill and Bonotti’s contention that to be suitably public, reasons must not only appeal to shared political values but also be grounded in a reasonable balance among those values. We show that this idea of a reasonable balance suffers from indeterminacy and therefore cannot help in determining whether a reason is public or not. Finally, we question the expansive interpretation of the scope of public reason employed in both books. We suggest that this interpretation is insufficiently inclusive for public deliberation in contemporary pluralist democracies.

Recent attempts at making sense of toleration as an ideal of political morality have focused on how liberal democratic institutions generate political arrangements that protect people’s freedom to “live their life as they see fit.” We show how these views rely on a one-dimensional interpretation of the liberal democratic political project. In so doing, they underestimate an important “interactive” dimension. This dimension concerns what it means for liberal democracies to realize toleration as a property inherent to their constitutive political processes. We illustrate this claim with reference to the liberal democratic decision-making process. Such a process realizes toleration as forbearance in itself. It does so because it establishes the participants in the process as political agents who recognize their mutual standing to share the political authority to make collectively binding decisions, despite their grounds for reciprocal objection.