Disagreement, Public Reason, and Epistemic Abstinence

ABSTRACT Political disagreements pose a range of philosophical challenges for citizens seeking to navigate politics. Epistemologists ask about the impact of peer disagreement on the justification of individual’s beliefs. Rawls’s Political Liberalism (2005) tackles the impact of reasonable disagreement on questions of justice and legitimacy in a political community, arguing for a turn to public reason when justifying political principles. Recently these two literatures have been brought together to develop epistemic foundations of and challenges to Rawlsian political liberalism. Against these recent trends, I will argue that there are good reasons for political liberals to remain epistemically abstinent about the impact of peer disagreement on citizens’ beliefs. I also extend the lessons from analyzing public reason and peer disagreement to suggest there are more general reasons for caution in applying the epistemology of disagreement literature to cases of political disagreement.