Gerald Gaus: The Order of Public Reason— A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World

Gerald Gaus’ book The Order of Public Reason is one of the most interesting manifestations of a recent trend in moral and political philosophy. Following Rawls it blends Kantian and non-Kantian approaches supplying at least some prominent schools of moral and political philosophy with a much needed patch of overlapping consensus. In particular, Humean and Kantian considerations are merged in a theory of rights-constrained social evolution. Gaus’ work stands out among others for asking the right questions and for providing good answers. He claims to outline a viable social ethic, i.e., a dutyand right-based ethic for the interaction between persons. Such an ethic tells us “what we owe to each other”, in Thomas Scanlon’s influential phraseology. However, the pervasiveness of reasonable disagreement concerning most issues of justice and duty even between good-willed moral evaluators is taken much more seriously by Gaus than by Scanlon and most other philosophers. This is a step in the right direction, because it underlines that a social ethic ought to be mainly concerned with secondorder considerations, considerations of what we owe to others who do not agree with our moral beliefs. Moreover, Gaus offers a further boon to the readers of this journal. He amply employs concepts of rational choice and game-theory thus documenting that they can be valuable instruments of philosophical analysis even beyond the narrower confines of neo-Hobbesian social contract theories.