Eberle on public reason

MOJ-friend and philosopher Chris Eberle sends these thoughts, regarding the recent posts here on public reason, religion, Professor Stone, and Professor Leiter:

[Professor Leiter wrote]: "To put it (a bit too) crudely, reasons are 'public' largely in virtue of a head count, not in virtue of their having more robust epistemic foundations."

[C]onceptions of public reason vacillate between (what I call) populist and epistemic conceptions of public reason. Often the advocate of a given conception doesn't distinguish clearly between the populist versions (of Professor Leiter's "head count" variety) and the epistemic versions. And you can get a sense of that in his formulation: public reasons are those that are the "kinds of reasons acceptable to all reasonable people in a pluralistic society." Is "reasonable" an epistemic category? Is it a moral category of sorts: "be reasonable, you can't take the big slice and leave me the teensie one!"? What does "acceptable" mean? Presumably, not that a kind of reason is *in fact* endorsed by all the reasonable folks. Perhaps, it means that a kind of reason *would be* endorsed by the reasonable folks *if* they were adequately informed and suitably rational. (That's one prominent conception.) But in that case, we might be very far from a head count version, since this counterfactual conception of what makes for a public reason might be consistent with no actual citizens endorsing any of the kinds of reasons that would be endorsed by all the adequately informed and rational folks. Indeed, it might be (hard to tell) consistent with the view that religious reasons are public reasons, since we might all endorse religious reasons if we were adequately informed (and so knew that the Koran is God's inspired Word!)

Conceptions of public reason typically begin by sounding so very commonsensical and then, under pressure of the very pluralism to which they in some sense respond, get very complicated, as their advocates have to make use of all kinds of epistemic epicycles and counter-factual deferents to make them "work." I try to lay this out systematically, and in gory detail, in the end of my book, which contains a chapter on the populist and a chapter on the epistemic conceptions of public reason.