I introduce a distinction between “slow and relatively harmonious” and “fast and radical” as far as the integration of AI into human life is concerned. Regarding the “slow and relatively harmonious” scenario, I explore a set of questions about how it would make sense for humans to acknowledge some such status in machines. But we must also ask whether self-conscious artificial intelligences would be morally equivalent to humans. I do so by asking what an increase in moral status for machines means for the political domain. Chapter 3 explored why AI would affect the democratic process in the near future. Here our concern is with a scenario further along. One question is whether there is a cognitive capacity beyond intelligence and self-consciousness that is needed for involvement in the political domain. Paying attention to what is appropriate to say about animals in that regard is useful. As far as the “fast and radical” scenario is concerned, I first explore why philosophically we are so dramatically unprepared to deal with an intelligence explosion, with a focus on what kind of moral status superintelligences might acknowledge in us. Finally, I attend to Tegmark’s discussion of political scenarios that could arise after an intelligence explosion and add a public-reason scenario that could offer a vision for a political context shared between humans and superintelligences.

This chapter argues that policing can be justified at its various levels (e.g., strategic, transactional) utilizing the requirement of Rawlsian public reason, wherein the reasons supplied for coercive government decisions that take up basic matters of justice must be ones that all citizens can access and evaluate from positions of equality. It uses the highly publicized arrest of two Black men for trespassing at a café in Philadelphia to illustrate the concern that procedural justice without public reason can yield troubling outcomes, especially when our intuitions tell us the reasons motivating the procedural transaction do not apply equally to all citizens (e.g., concerns of trespass in a café in a wealthy neighborhood would not apply equally to all citizens based on race, no matter how scrupulously the police employed Tyler’s procedural justice in response to the trespass allegations). While a public reason approach to police justification is a process that would not rule out the subjective judgments police make in complex and evolving situations, it would provide an adequate basis for evaluating overall resource allocations, and more importantly set a high expectation of reason giving grounded in equality as police make lower-level discretionary judgments.

This chapter examines the earliest natural rights theories in order to analyse philosophical connections between natural and human rights, concerning: scepticism, metaphysical dualism, and the authority of rights. First, the chapter studies Albert the Great’s principles of right and how he understood nature to be reason. Next, analysis of the main tenets of Henry of Ghent’s metaphysics, and his exposition of the soul’s property over one’s body, show that Neoplatonist dualism was fundamental in the development of the first natural rights theories. The philosophical solution to the poverty controversy, of human beings’ natural rights to use material goods, that Hervaeus Natalis proposed became the law of the Church when the Pope incorporate it in the bull, Cum inter nonnullos (1323). Hervaeus continued the metaphysical dualism of Henry and argued that natural rights endowed reality with normativity and hence authority. The chapter concludes by relating this intellectual history to contemporary rights theories. Natural and human rights are identified as a form of public reason that sometimes assists, other times substitutes for, individual right reason and judgement about morality.

“The problem of absolutes” refers to the difficulty of grounding and defending absolute prohibitions in a legal system that is rationalized on the basis of means-ends rationality. (An example might be the difficulty in identifying an absolute prohibition on torture that is not susceptible to being reinterpreted, read down, or negotiated away.) In the present paper, I associate this difficulty in the first instance with Max Weber’s account of the rationalization of law and the distancing of law from any sense of sacred or transcendent obligation. But other developments need to be considered as well. I argue that the problem is as much about morality as it is about law. The two law and morality develop together in a complementary way, and the problem of legal absolutes tends to be matched by a corresponding difficulty with moral absolutes, just as the desanctification of law tends to be matched by a desanctification of morality

John Rawls’s full publicity condition says that persons in the society the philosopher theorizes about must in some sense have access to everything the philosopher says in her theorizing. In other words, everyone living in Rawls’s perfectly just society must have access to A Theory of Justice and related works. This account of publicity is the most difficult to analyze because there are many different interpretations of what, precisely, it requires and also many different arguments in its favor. Not only this, but certain criticisms of Rawls that some deem fatal to his project depend on particular interpretations of this publicity condition that can quite reasonably be rejected. In the current chapter I show that, once again, we face deep trade-offs. Insisting on this account of publicity will change the way political philosophy must be done, but doing so will help achieve normatively worthwhile ends.

The well-ordered society, according to John Rawls, is one that is regulated by principles of justice and in which everyone accepts these principles. One understanding of publicity takes this latter requirement a step further. According to Rawls, not only must everyone in the well-ordered society accept the same theory of justice, but publicity demands that everyone know that everyone else accepts this theory. Citizens’ beliefs about morality and justice must be transparent to one another. I examine this understanding of publicity in the current chapter. Why insist on such a requirement? I argue that the main reason has to do with social unity. If social unity in a diverse liberal order is to be achieved, then we must know what our fellow citizens believe about justice. The problem is that generating the knowledge required by this understanding of publicity is riddled with difficulties. I propose some mechanisms that might be capable of getting the job done. These mechanisms are, however, deeply imperfect.

Public reason approaches to political legitimacy typically claim that members of society are free and equal when they live under institutions that are publically justified. Institutions are publically justified when they can be justified in the right way to the reasoning of each member. However, the requirements of publically justified institutions are also backed by political coercion or other social practices through which individuals are held accountable to those requirements, though the result is supposedly citizens being free in a positive sense. Throughout this development, public reason theorists have seemed to presume that legitimate institutions are sufficient for securing the freedom of its members, even the members that do not think those institutions are best. This change from best to merely legitimate, however, raises serious difficulties for the account of freedom within public reason theories, particularly when we consider the level of divergence that may exist between the institutions favored by one’s own reason and the merely legitimate institutions one may live under. This chapter elaborates the difficulties that public reason views face regarding liberty in a merely legitimate regime, and considers the main strategies available to such accounts for understanding the liberty of members of legitimate societies.

The chapter claims that Political Liberalism (PL) is unsuitable to the Israeli situation. PL envisions a liberal constitutional structure that protects the rights of free and equal citizens and serves as an ideational basis for a reasonable overlapping consensus. My internal critique of PL is that its loose definition of reasonable comprehensive doctrines, together with the ideas of overlapping consensus, impartiality and public reason, curtail PL’s ability to maintain a liberal constitutional structure that adequately protects rights. Essentially, PL’s reliance on the willingness of illiberal groups to embrace it renders it ineffective where such groups wield a more than negligible political power. Israel is such a setting. A second reason for PL’s unsuitability for Israel is that Israel’s constitutional structure includes fundamental deviations from liberal constitutional principles, both in the area of religion–state relations and in the area of ethnic (Jewish–Arab) relations. Consequently, application of PL in Israel must be preceded by a fundamental change in Israel’s constitutional structure. Otherwise the application of a form of PL adjusted to its current constitutional structure would result in the continued violation of the rights of ethnic and religious minorities and of women, and lead to the instability of Israeli democracy.

The capability approach offers a perspective on the concept of public reason itself, on its import for social and global justice, and on its import for democracy. (1) While ‘public reasoning’ can describe all attempts at justifying public policies, including bad reasoning, ‘public reason’ is a normative concept implying norms for good reasoning. The capability approach is unsupportive of narrow Rawlsian norms restricting public reason to ‘purely political’ values. It conceives of public reason as relying upon a norm of equal consideration for everyone’s good (modelled in terms such as an impartial spectator, or equal dignity). (2) Valuable capabilities conferring advantage or disadvantage are discoverable by public reason and are not immune to reconsideration by it — thus capability concepts are not dogmatically philosophical. Neither are capability concepts dogmatically democratic: mistakes about valuable capabilities can also be made by existing public reasoning (which can include bad reasons). Combining capability concepts with its norm of equal consideration empowers public reason to detect unjust inequalities without being bound to any theoretical conception of social or global justice. (3) Similar reasoning can be used to assess the degree to which public power is exercised democratically.

This chapter discusses the remaining three conceptions of the political philosopher, and adopts a version of the Rawlsian view organized around a notion of public reason. Political philosophy has four distinct tasks. The first is to help create societies that decide about constitutional essentials and justice from a standpoint of public reason. The second task involves making substantive proposals. This might involve anything from proposing principles of justice to commenting on policy. Most philosophical writing aimed at the public is part of this task. The third task is to ponder concepts such as common good, rights, and justice. This task involves philosophical background work concerning the merits of different conceptions of justice. The fourth task occurs within comprehensive doctrines. Full justification requires integration of a conception of justice within a doctrine. How, and whether, this is possible requires philosophical debate. Combining the first three roles, philosophers emerge as theory-providing citizen-discussants.

The proposal I make in this book is that the perennial quest for justice is about making sure each individual has an appropriate place in what our uniquely human capacities permit us to build, produce, and maintain, and that each individual is respected appropriately for their capacities to hold such a place to begin with. Following a distinction that goes back to Aristotle, under this umbrella we later distinguish commutative from distributive justice. The former maintains and restores an earlier status quo that set the stage for the interaction or otherwise responds to violations. The latter is concerned with sharing out whatever a community holds in common.

We explore the motivation for a public reason standpoint that comes from what Rawls calls the “burdens of judgment,” challenges in interpreting our moral lives that generate a plurality of interpretations. These burdens and the implied fact of reasonable pluralism motivate a public reason view. Defenders of comprehensive doctrines are not asked to abandon talk about truth or correctness, but to realize that competent reasoners invariably embrace different doctrines. This approach suits an era of global interconnectedness in the face of diversity but also faces stiff resistance. We then connect the Rawlsian account of public reason for the domestic case to the grounds-of-justice approach. The key idea is that the grounds can be understood as being included in an overlapping consensus. Then, Rawls’s construction for public reason carries over to the global level. This development of global public reason also completes the account of the political philosopher from Part I.

Justice is a political value that holds across reasonable comprehensive doctrines. I introduce the notion of a frame of human life. For Aristotle, the polis does that job, but nowadays the institutions and practices that do so are embedded into the human web. To call something a “political value” – beyond the generic sense of pertaining to the creation of order – means that it pertains to the design of that frame. Justice is the value of giving each their own within this frame. The political value of distributive justice gives rise to principles of justice, which generate rights and duties. Justice honors the distinctiveness of each within the distinctively human life. That is why the value of distributive justice is the most stringent value. Justice as a value radiates into different domains of practical reasoning in ways that principles, rights, or duties do not. It takes exceptionally strong considerations to offset justice.