The Order of Public Reason

Gerald Gaus is currently the James E. Rogers Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. He was previously Professor of Philosophy and Political Economy at Tulane University. He is the author of a number of books, including On Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (2008), Contemporary Theories of Liberalism (2003) and Justificatory Liberalism (1996). He has been an editor of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy and was a founding editor of Politics, Philosophy & Economics. His essay 'On Justifying the Moral Rights of the Moderns' won the 2009 American Philosophical Association's Kavka Award.

• 1. The fundamental problem; Part I. Social Order and Social Morality: 2. The failure of instrumentalism; 3. Social morality as the sphere of rules; 4. Emotion and reason in social morality; Part II. Real Public Reason: 5. The justificatory problem and the deliberative model; 6. The rights of the moderns; 7. Moral equilibrium and moral freedom; 8. The moral and political orders; Appendix A: the plurality of morality; Appendix B: Mozick's attempt to solve the prisoner's dilemma; Appendix C: deontic utility functions; Appendix D: the Kantian coordination game; Appendix E: protection of property rights and economic freedom in states that do best at protecting civil rights.

'The Order of Public Reason is one of the most ambitious and accomplished works in moral philosophy of the first decade of the new century. Gaus's command of the relevant literature in philosophy, economics, psychology, and elsewhere is daunting, and his ability to orchestrate a sustained argument leading from foundational postulates of the logic of practical reason to prescriptions for effective politics is altogether masterful.' Loren Lomasky, University of Virginia