Cosmetic liberalism, or narrowing the boundaries of the reasonable

Anne Barnhill and Matteo Bonotti’s Healthy Eating Policy and Political Philosophy and Josh Milburn’s Food, Justice, and Animals both adopt a public reason approach to food ethics. This approach is plausible, especially because it acknowledges reasonable pluralism among conceptions of the good regarding food, and thus expresses respect for people as free and equal. However, both books also employ what I call a ‘cosmetic’ approach to the relevant conceptions of the good, revising them in order to make them suitable for public reasoning. This means that the legitimacy of the food policies proposed in the books rests on a coercive revision of reasonable conceptions of the good, which is inconsistent with respect for reasonable pluralism.