Rawlsian Public Reason and Political Vice

Abstract Rawls suggests that facts about the political virtues must be part of the construction of a reasonable political conception of justice. The thesis of this article is that, if an account of political virtue is a necessary element in a reasonable political conception, then so too is an account of political vice. The political vices are those attitudes, feelings, and dispositions that systematically work against reasonableness or the other cooperative or discursive goals of political virtue. The article concentrates on several epistemic-political vices along with practical-political vices that have epistemic elements. Epistemic-political vices such as close-mindedness or gullibility are especially worrisome in the digital age, given their tendency to undermine practices of public reasoning and deliberative democracy. Each political vice is understood as a characteristic failure of one of the Rawlsian burdens of judgment. Each is in this way a more specific form of unreasonableness.