Navigating the narrow circle: Rawls and Stout on justification, discourse and institutions

Life in political society unfolds within the bounds of a narrow circle, epistemic and moral. A person has only finite faculties and restricted moral motivation. When formulating projects, the person ought to recognize these limits but also to check them. Accordingly, she seeks a deliberative ideal which is sensitive both to good epistemic practice and to respectful relations. How might the person best justify the shape of her society’s institutions, statutes and policies? What reflexive attitudes and dispositions ought she to adopt towards her justificatory resources? The person might work through the sequence of standpoints from John Rawls’s “political liberalism”: a first-person, action-guiding framework of deliberation and reflection. Alternatively, she might model the exploratory discourse and personal virtues characteristic of Jeffrey Stout’s “democratic traditionalism”. This work reconstructs Rawls’s and Stout’s approaches to justification, discourse and institutions and compares their differing methods in search of the most adequate deliberative ideal for democratic society.