The Concept of the Reasonable in International Political Justification: A Rejoinder to the Poststructuralist Critique

Abstract

In the last three chapters I have attempted, through detailed expositions and parallel readings of the work of Rawls, Buchanan and Kratochwil, to conceptualise the structure of a ‘complete’ account of normative reason. Such an account, I argued, has the potential to augment synthesised conceptions of practical, moral and legal reasoning, anchored around an account of normatively secured common understandings (as developed in detail by Kratochwil), within the framework of a Rawlsian form of political constructivism. By so doing, I claimed, Kratochwil’s arguments concerning the presence and effects of norms (and the contextualising effects of the historically conditioned ‘commonplaces’ of practical discourse) in influencing the orientation, pathways and legitimacy of practical reasoning¹ allow for the development of an account of how normative reasoning functions within the context of intersubjective normative structure, and which is crucially capable of accommodation within the framework of a Rawlsian political constructivism. The latter is vital because of the need to provide a justificatory context by which the idea of public reason (which I have claimed forms the core of Rawls’ con-structivist project), as a normatively significant and justifying concept, is vindicated. Without such a framework (and, crucially, the underlying concept of the reasonable which I will consider in this section), crucial questions concerning the ways in which the limits of public reason provide the means for a strong, legitimate form of justification that can validly be invoked in justifying principles of international justice will remain unanswered.