Global public reason: too thick or too thin

Most significant policy issues facing humanity reach across national borders. Consequential political decisions with cross-national effects are frequently made by states, non-state organisations, and corporations. Under these circumstances, it is widely acknowledged that it is important to conduct deliberation at the global level. Below this shallow agreement, however, lies deep disagreement about a crucial question: how, if at all, is it morally permissible for deliberation to result in a set of international laws and rules that are imposed on a world population which is deeply pluralistic in its moral and political attitudes? When the equivalent question is asked within the confines of a political community, one prominent answer is by reference to a standard of public reason. While there is a large literature about public reason at the domestic level, the literature on global public reason is comparatively underdeveloped. The paper addresses this lacuna in two ways. First, it motivates the global public reason project, and conceptualises the nature of the challenge that accounts of global public reason face. Second, it demonstrates that, by their own evaluative standards, existing accounts of global public reason are unable to satisfy both desiderata simultaneously, being either too ‘thick’ or too ‘thin’

Globalisation, legitimacy and public deliberation

Most significant policy issues facing humanity reach across national borders. Consequential political decisions with cross-national effects are frequently made by states, non-state organisations, and corporations. Under these circumstances, it is widely acknowledged that it is important to conduct public deliberation at the global level. Below this shallow agreement, however, lies much less clarity on how deliberative principles can be applied at the global level. This challenge is the focus of my thesis. I begin by arguing that existing theories of global deliberation have not yet satisfactorily answered two questions. The first pertains to the agents involved: who speaks? The second relates to procedure and institutional design: where should global deliberation take place? In both cases I suggest that modifications to prevalent views in the existing literature are required. To press this argument, the thesis identifies several epistemic and non-epistemic values that public deliberation seeks to realise, before testing candidate proposals for institutionalising global deliberation against these values. I then turn to the primary contribution of the thesis, on the question of how supranational public deliberation should be conducted. To do this I conceptualise and address the problem of global public justification: how, if at all, is it permissible to impose a set of international laws and rules on a world population that is deeply pluralistic in its moral and political attitudes? There have been three main attempts to resolve this problem, locating legitimacy in either competition, neutrality or dialogue between different value systems. I argue that neither of the first two attempts succeeds. I then develop and defend the third route to global legitimacy, outlining its general features, and illustrating how it should proceed. To do this, I analyse a particular value or principle which would be likely to emerge from philosophical dialogue as a publicly justifiable value for use in global decision-making: the value of ‘oneness’