Public reason and value change

Democratic legitimacy relies on public reason — the exchange of reasons that citizens and officials can reasonably accept — yet public reason is not static. How, and under what conditions, do public reasons change? And when is such change legitimate? This paper argues that philosophy of technology, with its rich tradition of theorizing value change and technomoral change, offers underexplored resources for addressing these questions. I begin by formulating four desiderata for any adequate account of public reason change: (1) accounting for the public character of public reasons; (2) accounting for their "reasonableness"; (3) explaining why and how public reasons change; and (4) distinguishing justified from unjustified change. I argue that mainstream political philosophy has struggled to meet desiderata (3) and (4) precisely because it lacks a dynamic theory of normative change. Drawing on the pragmatist account of technology-induced value change developed in van de Poel and Kudina (2022), I propose that public reasons change when new sociotechnical problems emerge that existing reasons cannot adequately address. Technologies create moral situations that put pressure on public reason. In this view, technomoral change is not an aberration to democratic deliberation but a constitutive feature of it in technologically turbulent times. I then explore two challenges this account must overcome: explaining what makes the process genuinely a change in public reason rather than just (shared) values, and being able to distinguishing justified public reason changes from unjustified ones. Drawing on pragmatist political philosophy, I suggest that legitimate public reason change may be understood as the outcome of open, inclusive, and ongoing deliberative processes in which affected communities reconstitute their shared normative and conceptual frameworks in response to technological disruption.