The burdens of judgment are considerations intended to explain the persistence of reasonable disagreement, and to motivate parties to obey the constraints of public reason in the face of this disagreement.

Public reason constrains political agents, when those agents seek to engage the coercive machinery of politics. In particular, political agents are enjoined to restrict the reasons they invoke (in certain political contexts) to those that do not rely crucially upon comprehensive doctrines about which the parties can be expected to disagree. The ideal of public reason involves a principled refusal, on the part of political agents, to invoke their own controversial moral and political views when arguing about constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice.

The burdens of judgment are intended to support the commitments of these political agents, by giving a series of explanations for the existence of a reasonable pluralism of comprehensive doctrines. The burdens of judgment help these agents avoid the temptation to regard their own comprehensive doctrines as a sufficient justiication for political coercion exercised over those who reject that doctrine. To accept the burdens of judgment, he argues, is to commit oneself to the shared task of seeking standards of justiication that can be accepted by a plurality of reasonable comprehensive doctrines. Reasonable people commit themselves to the search for these standards, even in circumstances in which they might be able to rely upon their own comprehensive doctrines as justiications for public policy. The burdens of judgment are intended as a set of considerations to provide support for reasonable agents in this search.