Workshop: 'Public Reason Across Time and Space: New Voices and Perspectives'

Workshop: 'Public Reason Across Time and Space: New Voices and Perspectives' Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago, Chile 11-12 December 2025  

Public reason is one of the most influential concepts in contemporary political theory. Its central tenet is that in diverse societies, policies and laws should not be simply imposed through coercion or based on majority rule but that they should be publicly justified by appealing to reasons that are public—i.e. reasons that appeal to widely shared political values (e.g. fair equality of opportunity, basic rights and liberties, racial and gender equality, etc.) as well as scientific and factual evidence (Rawls 2005).  

Debates on public reason, however, have so far been characterized by two key shortcomings. First, they normally view public reason as static over time. Yet public reason can change, as testified for example by the way in which concepts such as environmental sustainability and animal welfare have become part of the shared vocabulary of public debate in liberal democratic societies over the past few decades (e.g. Flanders 2012, 2014; White and Ypi 2011). This kind of change is important in order to ensure that 'the claims of groups or interests arising from social change...gain their appropriate political voice' (Rawls 2005, p. 452). And, indeed, there is a growing interest in the implications of public reason liberalism for climate action, especially in relation to non-anthropocentric perspectives and issues of intergenerational justice (e.g. Matthews 2023; Nielsen and Hauge-Helgestad 2022). Second, public reason debates normally focus on Western (and especially European/North American) societies, neglecting whether and how public reason can operate across cultural and linguistic divides, particularly in non-Western societies. These may include societies centred around non-liberal values (e.g. Kim 2016; Salam 2019) or those which have embraced substantive conceptions of the good life in their constitutions, such as the Indigenous notion of buen vivir ('living well') that was constitutionalized in several Latin American countries in recent years (e.g. Bressa Florentin 2017; Scott et al. 2018). Public reason liberals have also mostly neglected whether and how public reason can operate at the global level, and its relationship with notions of global justice and global democracy (for notable exceptions, see Afnan 2023; Director 2019; Williams 2017).

This workshop, co-organized by Associate Professor Cristóbal Bellolio (Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago, Chile) and Associate Professor Matteo Bonotti (Monash University, Melbourne, Australia) will aim to address these two shortcomings. We invite paper proposals which engage, inter alia, with the following questions:

• Can public reason change over time? If so, which changes are desirable and which ones are not?
• How and why can public reason change, e.g. through which historical processes and as a result of the actions of which social and political actors?
• What are the implications of public reason for debates on climate change and climate action, including (but not limited to) debates related to non-anthropocentric perspectives and issues of intergenerational justice?
• Is public reason possible in non-liberal societies?
• What form(s) might public reason take in non-Western societies characterized by cultural, religious and/or linguistic traditions different from those that are dominant in Western societies?
• Is public reason compatible with the constitutionalization of substantive conceptions of the good life?
• Is a global public reason possible?
• How does the idea of a global public reason relate to the ideas of global justice and global democracy? 

Submission Guidelines Please submit a 300-word abstract in English or Spanish, anonymized for blind review, to [email protected] and [email protected] by 31 July 2025. Authors will be notified of submission outcomes by 15 August 2025. The workshop papers may be considered for inclusion in a special issue or edited collection following the workshop. Accepted contributions will be allocated a 30-minute presentation slot followed by a 15-minute discussion.

The workshop's location (Santiago, Chile), in the Global South, has been deliberately chosen in order to 'decentre' debates on public reason and give voice to previously excluded voices. To this end, the workshop will be conducted in hybrid format (i.e. in person and via Zoom) and will welcome submission and presentations in both Spanish and English (using translators/interpreters if necessary), thus also overcoming the strongly Anglophone-centric nature of public reason debates in contemporary political theory. 

For all correspondence, including abstract submissions and additional inquiries, please direct your communication to the workshop convenors Cristóbal Bellolio ([email protected]) and Matteo Bonotti ([email protected]).