Political liberals, a.k.a. public reason liberals, accept the ‘public justification requirement’ (PJR). According to the PJR, terms of political cooperation must be acceptable from the point of view of any reasonable citizen. Political liberals also think that liberal terms of political cooperation satisfy the PJR, and, indeed, that they are superior to others precisely because of this. Satisfaction of the PJR isn’t just a welcome bonus for any political order that achieves it: most people who defend the PJR in contemporary political philosophy take it to express or flow from something of fundamental moral importance.

In this paper, I focus on political liberals who claim Rawlsian pedigree for their views. As I argue, you can reconstruct three distinct arguments for the PJR from Rawls’s writings. Once these arguments are distinguished, a dilemma emerges for proponents of the PJR who appeal to them. One of the arguments vindicates a restricted conception of the PJR’s ‘justificatory constituency’—the group of reasonable people to whom terms of cooperation must be justifiable. But this comes at the cost of depriving the PJR of the moral force that contemporary defenders take it to have. On the other hand, the impression of its moral force can be vindicated by either of the other two Rawlsian arguments. But this comes at the cost of expanding the justificatory constituency in a way that threatens PJR-based accounts’ power to vindicate liberalism. The upshot is that contemporary defenders of the PJR should think twice before invoking Rawls in support of their views. There is no argument to be found in Rawls’s work for any such requirement that also packs the kind of moral punch that contemporary political liberals take it to have