Equal Citizenship and Public Reason: A Feminist Political Liberalism
Christie Hartley and Lori Watson
Abstract
This book is a defense of political liberalism as a feminist liberalism. The first half of the book develops and defends a novel interpretation of political liberalism. It is argued that political liberals should accept a restrictive account of public reason and that political liberals’ account of public justification is superior to the leading alternative, the convergence account of public justification. In the second half of the book, it is argued that political liberalism’s core commitments restrict all reasonable conceptions of justice to those that secure genuine, substantive equality for ... More
This book is a defense of political liberalism as a feminist liberalism. The first half of the book develops and defends a novel interpretation of political liberalism. It is argued that political liberals should accept a restrictive account of public reason and that political liberals’ account of public justification is superior to the leading alternative, the convergence account of public justification. In the second half of the book, it is argued that political liberalism’s core commitments restrict all reasonable conceptions of justice to those that secure genuine, substantive equality for women and other marginalized groups. Here it is demonstrated how public reason arguments can be used to support law and policy needed to address historical sites of women’s subordination to advance equality; prostitution, the gendered division of labor and marriage, in particular, are considered.
Keywords:
political liberalism,
public reason,
equal citizenship,
public justification,
feminism,
gender,
prostitution,
marriage,
gender division of labor,
religion
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2018 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190683023 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2018 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190683023.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Christie Hartley, author
Associate Professor of Philosophy, Georgia State University
Lori Watson, author
Professor and Chair of Philosophy, Affiliated Faculty School of Law, University of San Diego
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