✐ ✐ “arg2013” — 2013/10/26 — 15:48 — page 1 — #1 ✐ ✐ ✐ ✐ ✐ ✐ What Makes Some Considerations Legitimate Political Arguments? On Public Reasons in Rawlsian Liberalism Wojciech Ciszewski a Abstract. The paper considers an important problem set against the backcloth of John Rawls’s political liberalism, namely the issue of the distinctiveness of public reasons. According to Rawls public reasons are types of proper arguments and con- siderations that may be invoked in democratic political life. They are the reasons that fulfil the requirement of the liberal legitimacy. In different writings, Rawls describes them in terms of common acceptability, universality, accessibility, shareabil- ity, transparency, and intelligibility. In the paper the author aims at answering the doubt raised by Ronald Dworkin with regard to the distinctive character of public reasons. The re- sponse will be given by developing an adequate definition of public reasons in six steps. Keywords. Public reasons, argumentation, legitimacy, politi- cal liberalism, justificatory reasons, constructivism. a Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland; ciszewski.wojciech@gmail.com () 1