Public reason and food policy

Abstract

People differ widely in their eating habits. This often reflects fundamental disagreements among their conceptions of the good as these relate to health, culinary traditions, animals’ interests, and so on. How laws regulating food production, distribution, and consumption can be legitimate despite such pluralism is an important question, and we welcome Josh Milburn’s and Anne Barnhill and Matteo Bonotti’s attempts to show how public reason liberalism can help address it. However, we believe that they expect too much from public reason. First, we raise questions about Milburn’s conception of reasonableness. We show that the ability of public reason theories to support a ‘zoopolis’ will vary according to their conceptualization of the relevant justificatory constituency, or ‘reasonable’ citizens. Secondly, we criticize Barnhill and Bonotti’s contention that to be suitably public, reasons must not only appeal to shared political values but also be grounded in a reasonable balance among those values. We show that this idea of a reasonable balance suffers from indeterminacy and therefore cannot help in determining whether a reason is public or not. Finally, we question the expansive interpretation of the scope of public reason employed in both books. We suggest that this interpretation is insufficiently inclusive for public deliberation in contemporary pluralist democracies.