Academic

The Burdens of Judgment in Law, Politics, & Culture

By Robert Justin Lipkin

The idea of  "the burdens of judgment" in the subtitle of this weblog can be understood in this way: Reasonable disagreement--disagreement that is not resolvable by attending 

The burdens of judgment do not serve as a shill for either conceptual or epistemic skepticism. Indeed, according to this doctrine, there may very well be right answers to hot-button controversies as well as correct methodologies for discovering them. The problem is not agreement on a right answer is impossible just difficult. Therefore, in both the underlying structure of political society, constitutional foundations, and, my view, ordinary politics, one needs to heed the admonition that republican democrats cannot impose their answers of one's fellow citizens. Moreover, the burdens of judgment suggest a political attitude that one needs to condition oneself to exhibit: since all citizens are moral and political equals no one can have a corner on the truth. The difficulty in avoiding reasonable disagreement should chasten those who think of democracy as merely a vehicle for getting their own way. Rather it is a process, a deliberative process, of reflectively constructing judgments that in principle can achieve provisional closure to hot-button debates among moral and political equals. But a republican democrat realizes that sometimes, many times perhaps, even provisional closure is elusive. In such circumstances, one should not retreat within the inner recesses of one's substantive positions--whether it is libertarianism or Marxism, for example--rather one's needs to subject one's substantive position to the reflective criticism of others and acknowledge how unlikely it is for one's substantive position to emerge from such deliberative debate unchanged in significant ways. Imagining that it can illustrates a failure to appreciate the significance of the burdens of judgment.
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      [1] John Rawls, Political Liberalism 54-58 (1993) with a slight gloss by me.

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Full post as published by Essentially Contested America on January 25, 2008 (boomark / email).