Public Reason at Fifty

This essay shows the continued value of Rawls’s public reason project. Its internal tendency is to generate new ideas. To do so, I review seven models of public reason, beginning with A Theory of Justice. Following Political Liberalism, I focus on Rawls’s unaddressed problem of justice pluralism. Rawls did not contain reasonable disagreement abou tjustice. Failing to stop it requires developing a fourth model of public reason. If Rawlsians accept justice pluralism, they must explore Gerald Gaus’s public reason project, so I introduce three models of public reason in Gaus’s work. The final model has only begun to bear fruit, generating a research program Gaus called the New Diversity Theory. Rawls and Gaus show that the public reason project remains a fertile research program