 There are, broadly, two ways one might defend the idea of public reason from this objection. First, one might deny that the idea of public reason does indeed apply to itself. On some formulations, the idea of public reason is a constraint on the exercise of political power, or a constraint on the exercise of coercion, but not itself an exercise of political power, nor an exercise of coercion. When the proponent of public reason states that political or moral rules must be publicly justifiably to be legitimate, she does not exert power or coercion over anyone, she merely states a condition that any purportedly legitimate exercises of power or coercion must meet to be legitimate (Bajaj 2017). The success of this reply, however, may depend on a controversial presumption in favor of states of affairs where political power or coercion is not exercised. It seems to assume, for example, that refusals to aid others, and other non-coercive choices, need not meet the test of public reason. Proponents of public reason might also argue that the principle of public reason does not apply to itself because it is a “meta” claim about the appropriate conditions for moral or political justification, and not a first order normative claim within that discourse (Gaus 2011, 227–228). But this line of reply is also open to challenge, since the idea of public reason does sometimes appear to operate as a first order normative claim, for example, it can be deployed to justify why one person cannot permissibly coerce another, or why the latter person is justified in forcefully resisting that coercion.