Public debates in our societies are marked by appeals to tradition, religion and even manipulative uses of post-truth. This book argues that the antidote to such tendencies can only be public reasoning. We can find the resources to build what I call the public perspective if we make two commitments: to respect people as free autonomous agents and to endorse a shared ethics of beliefs. An ethics of belief is a set of epistemic and moral rules that inform the beliefs that we bring to the public forum and make possible discussion and confrontation on a terrain that is adequately public. The epistemological aspects cannot be severed from the political commitments that motivate public justification in the first place. An ethics of belief shields us against two temptations: on the one hand, to abandon reason and claim that all sorts of beliefs and opinion should weigh into public reasoning; or, on the other, to appeal to objective reasons only, independently of whether people recognise them as such or not.

Maria Paola Ferretti is a senior researcher in Political Theory at the Goethe University of Frankfurt on Main (Germany), where she is currently working on a research project on the ethics of risk imposition funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). She has studied philosophy in Italy (Laurea, University of Pavia 1995) and Political Theory in Britain (MA York 1997; PhD Manchester 2002). Her research interests include contemporary liberalism, democratic participation, and the ethics of public policy, with a focus on risk regulation and political corruption. She has published in journals such as Politics, Philosophy and Economics, the Journal of Applied Philosophy, Social Philosophy and Policy, Review of Policy Research, Res Publica, and Philosophy Compass. She is a member of the executive committee of the Society for Applied Philosophy and secretary of the ECPR specialist group in Political Theory.

CH. 1 THE PUBLIC PERSPECTIVE: AN INTRODUCTION / CH.2 PUBLIC REASON AND AGREEMENT / CH.3 THE ETHICS OF BELIEF AND THE LIBERAL TRADITION / CH.4 HAVING REASONS AND GIVING REASONS / CH.5 FACING DISAGREEMENT / CH.6 EQUAL FREEDOM / CH. 7 LIBERAL MULTICULTURALISM / 8. CONCLUSIONS / ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS / BIBLIOGRAPHY