Reasonable Disagreement About, and Within, Watson and Hartley's Political Liberalism

This article considers how successfully Watson and Hartley achieve the two main aims of their excellent book,Equal Citizenship and Public Reason: first, developing and defending a distinctive version of political liberalism and, second, showing that this is a feminist political liberalism. I challenge both their general defence of their view and the arguments regarding feminism. Both discussions raise questions about the conceptualisation of reasonable disagreement, so I finish with some further comments about ways in which reasonable disagreement about justice creates internal tensions within Watson and Hartley's theory.