Consensus political liberalism and residues of justice: a reassessment of the normative relevance of the inconclusiveness of public reason

How should liberal democratic states deal with conflicting claims of justice, which – similarly reasonable – pull its action in opposite directions? Do the normative challenges posed by reasonable disagreement about political justice exceed the issue of how to settle them legitimately? By challenging the dominant position within the boundaries of so-called “consensus political liberalism,” the thesis proposes an affirmative answer to the second question. Hence, it develops a more complex answer to the first one than that mainstream political liberalism offers. As its most notable contribution, the thesis introduces the notion of "political-moral failure" to the normative landscape of political liberalism. When public reason is inconclusive, multiple outcomes can be defended as reasonable requirements of justice whose adjudication reaches an impasse. These “dilemmas of reasonable justice” – I contend – allow for the existence of “residues of justice” – i.e., genuine moral losses due to legitimate decisions. Political-moral failure captures an institutional shortcoming that, while not an instance of injustice, cannot be side-lined as “mere misfortune” – i.e., the amoral characterisation of the inevitable costs of social cooperation under legitimate rule. The thesis provides an important normative category to illuminate the full complexity of the joint realisation of two core political liberal commitments – i.e., protecting certain basic interests of citizens’ (e.g., basic liberties) and honouring the legitimacy of state action in conditions of reasonable disagreement. The thesis shows that a sense of partial alienation and resentment is warranted on the part of citizens who are morally failed, demonstrating that the realisation of reasonable justice and political legitimacy has normatively significant limitations in even ideal well-ordered liberal democracies. The state has a duty to acknowledge residues of justice to sustain respectful relations toward morally-failed citizens; a duty that complements the duty of public justification, whose almost unique investigation dominates current political liberal research.