Citizenship and 'public reasonableness'

So I've started off by reading a review from Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman (1994). This article provides a nice picture of the development of citizenship theory. Citizenship was not a hot topic in the post-war period. Instead, political theory focused on the ideas of justice and community membership. By the 90's, however, citizenship was receiving more attention. Rawls' focus on the institutional basic structure of society is certainly necessary, but it was recognized that the attitudes of citizens were another area that needed treatment from normative theory. This points to the need for a theory of citizenship. Kymlicka and Norman make the important point, that such a theory could be limitless, and so they limit their analysis to two areas: civic virtues and identity. In this post I am just going to focus on some of the ideas concerning civic virtues.

In their discussion of civic virtues, Kymlicka and Norman address the question of where citizens should learn the civic virtues they should have to be good citizens. Though they are talking about how citizens are to learn these virtues, this discussion necessarily involves a discussion of what those virtues are.

In answer to the question of where citizens will learn the necessary virtues, the authors note, and reject without comment, that the political right sees the marketplace as the location for the development of virtue. The meat of the discussion focuses on answers more palatable to the political liberal. The authors identify four possible answers, but I only want to discuss the last here, because it brings us to the main topic I want to discuss. This last answer comes from what the authors call “liberal virtue theory” and is represented by such authors as Guttmann, Macedo, and Galston. These authors see a number of virtues as necessary, but the most distinctive, and challenging, are the political virtues of questioning authority and engaging in public discourse. Since these political virtues are necessary for citizenship, there must be a space where they can be learned. Since we cannot rely on the family or church to expose students to different perspectives that might help them learn to engage in public discourse and question authority, the schools are seen as an ideal location for the development of these virtues (we have to note here, that most schools today do not fulfill this need, especially when it comes to the part about questioning authority).

One interesting requirement for citizens to engage in public discourse is that they must be able (and disposed) to do using publicly accessible reasoning. This means that when engaging in civic discourse, the reasons offered for a position must be possible reasons for any member of the citizenry to accept. For example, I could not enter into civic dialogue citing Christian scripture as the basis for my argument because I could not expect Muslim or atheist members of the society to accept those reasons because scripture does not have the same moral force for those individuals: the reason are not publicly accessible. (I should note that this requirement of public reasonableness does not just apply to religious views, but could also be applied to arguments from abstract philosophical concepts.)

I think this makes a lot of sense, but there is a problem in the argument that runs counter to the liberal ideal of respecting individual choice. Disallowing a Christian from making public arguments based on their faith asks them to reconstruct reasons for many beliefs for the purpose of public discourse. We don't disallow them from holding those beliefs on that basis, but say that their beliefs are only good as far as the boundaries of their religion. Beyond that, they must have an entirely different justification – one that is publicly accessible. It seems to me that there is a dilemma here. Either the Christian simply learns how to rephrase their beliefs so that they sound publicly acceptable (but are really still based on their religious beliefs) or they weaken their religious beliefs but accommodating them to fit with publicly accessible reasons. I'll admit that my perspective on this does not bode well for the religious beliefs (if they will be severely damaged by the accommodation to publicly accessible reasons, which I am not convinced of). However, I think it is necessary to acknowledge that there is a sacrifice here, but a necessary one if we wish to develop the necessary virtues of citizenship.

As a quick note, this discussion ties into the discussions about autonomy and the necessity of the development of autonomy, but more about that later.

Kymlicka, W., & Norman, W. (1994). Return of the citizen: A survey of recent work on citizenship theory. Ethics, 104(2). pp. 352-381.