Narrow or Broad? Questioning the Scope of Public Reason

This paper considers a fundamental issue set against the backcloth of John Rawls’s political theory, namely the issue of the proper scope of public reason. The concept of the scope of public reason refers to situations when publicly accessible reasons have moral priority over other normative considerations. The case is worth considering because, although making several remarks, Rawls’s position on the problem is ambiguous. In the paper, the author reconstructs the accurate scope by invoking two criteria: person oriented and issue oriented. The philosophical discussion on the subject is dominated by two interpretations of the breadth of public reason; however, the author believes we may indicate four plausible answers to the stated question.