Kevin Vallier

Bowling Green State University, Philosophy, Faculty Member

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I am an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University, where I direct our program in Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and Law (PPEL). My main areas of work are within political philosophy and ethics, though I have strong interests in philosophy of religion and political economy. My current research focuses on most dimensions of liberal political theory, and public reason liberalism in particular.
Address: Bowling Green, OH

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Books by Kevin Vallier

Must Politics Be War? v 4.0 (PDF)

Many think that politics is essentially an arena of strategic confrontation where parties struggl... more Many think that politics is essentially an arena of strategic confrontation where parties struggle to defeat their opponents. Partisans of all stripes divide people into the good and the bad—religious or rational, capitalist or worker, patriot or traitor, 1% or 99%, hateful or tolerant—and see politics as the means to victory. My book claims that this understanding of politics is mistaken. I develop an account of social order where moral and political disagreement can proceed while preserving moral peace, where people can see those they disagree with not as targets to be defeated, but as potential friends and neighbors who can cooperate to advance the diverse and divergent ends of each. In particular, I argue that liberal political institutions can create and preserve a moral peace between persons because they can be publicly justified – or justified from multiple reasonable points of view. In this way, public reason liberalism, the version of liberal political theory that weds liberal political institutions to a required of public justification, can show that politics in a liberal society needn’t be mere institutionalized aggression by competing groups.

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Must Politics Be War? v 4.0 (DOC)

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Papers by Kevin Vallier

Public choice theory

The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon, 2015

Moral Peace and Social Trust

Must Politics Be War?

This chapter explains why moral and political disagreement is pervasive and why there is a need t... more This chapter explains why moral and political disagreement is pervasive and why there is a need to cooperate with diverse others anyway. It then develops conceptions of trust, social trust, trustworthiness, and moral peace between persons that are required to explain how people who disagree with one another can cooperate. More specifically, the chapter develops an account of social trust as a social relationship that can maintain cooperation between diverse persons while respecting the dignity and worth of all. It also describes a moral peace between diverse persons as a society with a high degree of social trust. Determining which institutions properly sustain moral peace is the aim of the rest of the book.

Equal Citizenship and Convergence

Journal of Applied Philosophy

In Public Reason, Diversity Trumps Coherence

Journal of Political Philosophy

Process Democracy

Journal of Moral Philosophy

Democratic theorists have proposed a number of competing justifications for democratic order, but... more Democratic theorists have proposed a number of competing justifications for democratic order, but no theory has achieved a consensus. While expecting consensus may be unrealistic, I nonetheless contend that we can make progress in justifying democratic order by applying competing democratic theories to different stages of the democratic process. In particular, I argue that the selection of political officials should be governed in accord with aggregative democracy. This process should prize widespread participation, political equality, and proper preference aggregation. I then argue that the selection of public policies by political officials should be governed in accord with deliberative democracy. This process should prize high quality deliberation and political equality. A process democracy is a democracy that joins an aggregative process for selecting officials with a deliberative process for selecting policies. Democracy is justified and legitimate when it is structured in this...

In Defense of Idealization in Public Reason

Erkenntnis

Containing Ideological Rent Seekers Expanding the Reach of Buchanan’s Constitutionalism

Homo Oeconomicus

Associations in Social Contract Theory: Toward a Pluralist Contractarianism

Political Studies

Liberals can be distinguished from one another in a number of ways, including by what they regard... more Liberals can be distinguished from one another in a number of ways, including by what they regard as the greatest threats to liberty. According to Jacob T. Levy, “rationalist” liberals think that nonpolitical institutions are the chief threats to freedom and that democratic governance can free people from these private tyrannies. By contrast, “pluralist” liberals think that governments are the chief threats to liberty, and civil associations are a bulwark against encroaching state power. Levy has recently argued that the rationalist and pluralist strands of the liberal tradition cannot be combined into a single political theory. In this essay, I disagree. My strategy is to develop a version of contractarian political theory that treats associations as sources of legitimacy. This pluralist contractarianism solves two problems. It shows that the social contract theory can survive the pluralist critique. And since the social contract theory is often understood as rationalist liberalism...

Pluralistic Partisanship

Res Publica

Political Stability in the Open Society

American Journal of Political Science

We argue that the Rawlsian description of a just liberal society, the wellordered society, fails ... more We argue that the Rawlsian description of a just liberal society, the wellordered society, fails to accommodate deep disagreement and is insufficiently dynamic. In response, we formulate an alternative model that we call the open society, organized around a new account of dynamic stability. In the open society, constitutional rules must be stable enough to preserve social conditions that foster experimentation, while leaving room in legal and institutional rules for innovation and change. Systemic robustness and dynamic stability become important for the open society in a way that they are not in the well-ordered society. This model of the open society and the corresponding model of stability has interesting implications for thinking about the goals, norms, and institutions of liberal political systems.

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Exit, Voice, and Public Reason

American Political Science Review

Public reason liberals appeal to public deliberation to ensure that a legal order can be publicly... more Public reason liberals appeal to public deliberation to ensure that a legal order can be publicly justified to its citizens. I argue that this voice mechanism should be supplemented by exit mechanisms. By allowing citizens to exit legal orders they believe cannot be publicly justified, citizens can pressure states to change their laws. This exit pressure is sometimes more effective than deliberation. I explore federalism as an exit mechanism that can help public deliberation establish a publicly justified polity.

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Social contracts for real moral agents: a synthesis of public reason and public choice approaches to constitutional design

Constitutional Political Economy

Political Liberalism and the Radical Consequences of Justice Pluralism

Journal of Social Philosophy

Rawls, Piketty, and the Critique of Welfare-State Capitalism

The Journal of Politics

The Duties of Political Officials in a Minimally Secular State

Journal of Applied Philosophy

Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination, by John Corvino, Ryan T. Anderson, and Sherif Girgis

Faith and Philosophy

Religious Establishment and Public Justification

Oxford Scholarship Online

This chapter develops a principle that determines when governmental activity constitutes an objec... more This chapter develops a principle that determines when governmental activity constitutes an objectionable form of establishment, either religious or secular. Situated within the theory of public reason liberalism, the principle holds that non-coercive forms of establishment, such as the use of religious symbols in government, are governed by a publicly justified purpose requirement. To be permissible, the relevant governmental act must have a purpose that can be publicly justified to multiple qualified points of view. Given that few acts of establishment, religious or secular, have that purpose, this chapter concludes that public reason liberalism is generally unfriendly to non-coercive establishment.

Three Concepts of Political Stability: An Agent-Based Model

Social Philosophy and Policy

: Public reason liberalism includes an ideal of political stability where justified institutions ... more : Public reason liberalism includes an ideal of political stability where justified institutions reach a kind of self-enforcing equilibrium. Such an order must be stable for the right reasons — where persons comply with the rules of the order for moral reasons, rather than out of fear or self-interest. John Rawls called a society stable in this way well-ordered. In this essay, I contend that a more sophisticated model of a well-ordered society, specifically an agent-based model, yields a richer and more attractive understanding of political stability. An agent-based model helps us to distinguish between three concepts of political stability — durability, balance, and immunity. A well-ordered society is one that possesses a high degree of social trust and cooperative behavior among its citizens (durability) with low short-run variability (balance). A well-ordered society also resists destabilization caused by noncompliant agents in or entering the system (immunity). Distinguishing between these three concepts complicates the necessary reformulation of the idea of a well-ordered society. Going forward, public reason theorists must now distinguish between types of assurance, specify heretofore unknown aspects of reasonable behavior, and reconceive of the nonideal preconditions for forming a stable, ideal social order.

Must Politics Be War? v 4.0 (PDF)

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Must Politics Be War? v 4.0 (DOC)

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Public choice theory

The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon, 2015

Moral Peace and Social Trust

Must Politics Be War?

Equal Citizenship and Convergence

Journal of Applied Philosophy

In Public Reason, Diversity Trumps Coherence

Journal of Political Philosophy

Process Democracy

Journal of Moral Philosophy

In Defense of Idealization in Public Reason

Erkenntnis

Containing Ideological Rent Seekers Expanding the Reach of Buchanan’s Constitutionalism

Homo Oeconomicus

Associations in Social Contract Theory: Toward a Pluralist Contractarianism

Political Studies

Pluralistic Partisanship

Res Publica

Political Stability in the Open Society

American Journal of Political Science

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Exit, Voice, and Public Reason

American Political Science Review

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Social contracts for real moral agents: a synthesis of public reason and public choice approaches to constitutional design

Constitutional Political Economy

Political Liberalism and the Radical Consequences of Justice Pluralism

Journal of Social Philosophy

Rawls, Piketty, and the Critique of Welfare-State Capitalism

The Journal of Politics

The Duties of Political Officials in a Minimally Secular State

Journal of Applied Philosophy

Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination, by John Corvino, Ryan T. Anderson, and Sherif Girgis

Faith and Philosophy

Religious Establishment and Public Justification

Oxford Scholarship Online

Three Concepts of Political Stability: An Agent-Based Model

Social Philosophy and Policy

Gaus, Hayek, and the place of civil religion in a free society

The Review of Austrian Economics, 2016

Symposium introduction to Hayekian themes in The Order of Public Reason

The Review of Austrian Economics, 2016

This introduction provides an overview of the papers in the symposium on Hayekian themes in The O... more This introduction provides an overview of the papers in the symposium on Hayekian themes in The Order of Public Reason. Keywords F. A. Hayek. Gerald Gaus. Public reason JEL codes B25. B31. B53. P16 Readers of The Review of Austrian Economics widely recognize F. A. Hayek as one of the most important political economists of the twentieth century. Many books and articles, including articles in these pages, have used his work in their own economic theorizing and expanded upon it at length. In contrast, we seldom see political philosophers draw on Hayek's political thought. One reason for this is that Hayek's political philosophy is not constructed in the argumentative style common in Anglo-American political philosophy. Contemporary political philosophers have trouble detecting his contributions (not unlike mainstream economists who have trouble detecting Hayek's contributions to economics). Another reason is that Hayek's political positions are unpopular among political philosophers. Perhaps the greatest counterexample to Hayek neglect in contemporary political philosophy is Gerald Gaus's The Order of Public Reason, published in 2011. The Order of Public Reason is an attempt to defend a liberal political theory by drawing in part on Hayekian insights about mind, society, social evolution, and economic institutions. As I argue in my own contribution to this volume, the work can even be read as an attempt to synthesize the best parts of the liberal political theories advanced by John Rawls in

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Three Concepts of Political Stability

The dominant approach to state legitimacy in political philosophy, public reason liberalism, incl... more The dominant approach to state legitimacy in political philosophy, public reason liberalism, includes an ideal of political stability where justified institutions reach a kind of self-enforcing equilibrium. Citizens of a stable society generally recognize that all, or nearly all, people have sufficient reason to comply with directives issued by publicly justified institutions, such that unilateral deviations from those directives leads to a worse outcome from the defector’s point of view. In this essay, I contend that a more sophisticated model of social stability, specifically an agent-based model, yields a richer and more accurate ideal of political stability than what has appeared in the literature thus far. In particular, an agent-based model helps us to distinguish between three concepts of political stability—durability, balance, and immunity. A well-ordered society is one that possesses a high degree of social trust and cooperative behavior among its citizens (durability) with low short-run variability (balance). A well-ordered society also resists destabilization caused by non-compliant agents in or entering the system (immunity). Previous work on political stability within public reason liberalism has depended upon a single, coherent notion of stability. My tripartite distinction weakens attempts to elaborate, defend, and refute public reason views that employ a single, coherent notion of stability.

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Three Concepts of Political Stability

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Kevin Vallier

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