Who should be included in the Public Reason: Conditions of Primary Deliberation

There have been widespread debates concerning who should be included in the forum of enjoyment of public reason. The aim of our paper is to show there is no theoretical reason why any of comprehensive doctrines should be excluded from public reason and public deliberation, as Rawls claims. Even though we are aware, that our argumentation is linked to the liberal perspective only, we think it´s one of the core task for liberal theory not to ignore other political perspectives that stands outside of contemporary discussion about public reason because of exclusivist criteria of reasonability. We want to assert that every doctrine has its metaphysical background that determines it, no matter if it is comprehensive or political doctrine. In other words, albeit political doctrines do not have the ambition to cover the metaphysical level; they still bear such a metaphysical burden. We claim it is important to divide the framework of deliberation into two stages. In the first – ideal – stage, all people should have access into deliberation. The main aim of such stage is to determine the criterion of deliberation itself and the only justified condition of primary deliberation is a requirement of consent of everyone. This means that all the supporters of various comprehensive doctrines must agree on the basic criteria of public deliberation. The reason why we want to use the deliberation rather than the aggregative model of democracy is the epistemic dimension of deliberation itself, which enables to reach epistemically correct and legitimate decision. Hence, the aim of our paper is not to solve the problem, who should have an access to the public reason. Rather, we want to propose the answer to the question what is justifiable to do, given we do not agree on who should have an access to the public reason.