Gaus on Public Reason

Matthew Lister--soon to join us at Villanova as a VAP--has a review at the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews of Gerald Gaus's new book, The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World. As David Brooks once said of Reinhold Niebuhr's The Nature and Destiny of Man, it looks like it covers a lot of ground:

Gerald Gaus's book, The Order of Public Reason, is long, rich, and highly ambitious. It is also an important work, one that attempts both to give a rigorous account of the idea of public reason, developed out of an account of "social morality", and to show how, when the idea is properly understood, Classical Liberalism is the best way to structure a society where all are treated as free and equal. The Classical Liberalism that Gaus defends is an interesting and distinctive view, differing in important ways from both the "High Liberalism" of Rawls and those working in his wake, and from Libertarianism of the sort defended by Nozick, Rothbard, and others. While there are conservative elements to Gaus's approach, his is not a social conservative view, either. Classical Liberalism is not a new view, but Gaus has provided perhaps the most philosophically sophisticated justification for it.

This barely begins to touch on the many topics covered by Gaus along the way, including the relationship between reason and emotion in ethics, the role of instrumental reasoning in morality, the rationality and development of moral rules, the proper way to understand punishment and blame, and the place of history in morality, among others.