The Classical Tilt of Justificatory Liberalism 1 European Journal of Political Theory, forthcoming (2013) Andrew Lister Department of Political Studies Queen's University andrew.lister@queensu.ca Jan. 18, 2012 (SSRN Draft) The Order of Public Reason is Gerald Gaus's important new statement of justificatory lib- eralism. The idea of public justification is roughly that the exercise of political power must be justifiable to all those over whom it is exercised, where "justifiable to..." X, Y, and Z means ac- ceptable to each of X, Y, and Z assuming only some basic form of reasonableness, without X, Y or Z having to give up the conflicting but reasonable religious or philosophical perspectives they espouse. However, the book is much more than a refinement of Gaus's political philosophy. The Order of Public Reason attempts to explain and justify social morality; only in the last third of the book does Gaus attempt to trace the limits that a bona fide social morality places on the legit- imate exercise of political power. The book is highly synthetic, drawing on work in game the- ory, evolutionary psychology, and moral philosophy, as well as political theory. As it is also long, there is a danger that readers will miss the forest for the trees. The initial purpose of this essay is therefore to explain how the overall argument is meant to hang together. Having done that I will identify in a very preliminary way four points at which the argument might be chal- lenged, particularly as it relates to justificatory liberalism's "classical tilt." 2 The Order of Public Reason is animated by two fundamental problems. The first is the problem of authority in morality. This problem arises in relation to "social morality," all those moral rules that structure social interaction by requiring or prohibiting actions and grounding the demands we make of each other (2-3). On Gaus's view, at the heart of social morality lie claims to personal authority (8), meaning authority of one person over another, rather than the intellec- tual or epistemic authority that morality itself has over me. "Morality makes my actions your business, and so gives you standing to tell me what I must do" (9). Morality involves passing judgment, allotting blame, waxing indignant, making others feel guilty, and so on. By what right do we inflict this all on each other? (xvi, 5) It may be admirable to act on one's own view of what morality requires, but imposing this morality on others may seem distasteful or unhealthy, on Nietzschean grounds (5, 315), and it stands in tension with the commitment to respect others as free and equal persons who must take responsibility for acting on their own best understand- ing of what morality requires. As Locke argued, the natural liberty of man is to be free from dependence on the arbitrary will of any other man, but to have only the law of nature as his guide. A free moral person is thus "one who acts according to her own reasoning about the de- mands of morality," not the judgments of others about what morality demands (14-15). In the face of reasonable moral disagreement, the claims to authority we make on each other in everyday moral life may simply be authoritarian. The second problem The Order of Public Reason addresses is how to reconcile Humean / evolutionary and Kantian / justificatory accounts of moral rules. On the Humean view, moral