 Rawls’s account of the duty of civility and the site of public reason has been subject to a number of criticisms, some of which will be discussed in section 7 below. But even setting these objections aside, not all proponents of public reason believe that it ought to directly regulate the behavior of individual citizens in the manner suggested by Rawls. Some argue that the aims of public reason are best served by permitting ordinary citizens, and perhaps even elected officials, to debate and deliberate unconstrained by the duty of civility (e.g. Benhabib 2002, 108–112; Bohman 2003; Gaus 2009; Gaus and Vallier 2009; Vallier 2014; Vallier 2016). Some argue for this less restrictive view because they hold different conceptions of the constituency and content of public reason; the more philosophically indeterminate those conceptions are, the less plausible it is to impose a restrictive duty of civility on individual citizens, since only by allowing citizens to engage in a fairly unconstrained discourse can the content of public reason emerge (Benhabib 2002; Bohman 2003). Others reject the duty of civility because they endorse a different account of the structure of public reason. If, for example, the convergence view of public reason’s structure is correct, then citizens and officials need not refrain from appealing to religious or otherwise comprehensive arguments in political deliberations, since those reasons might succeed in justifying a proposed law to some members of the public, even if others cannot reasonably accept those reasons. Those who endorse consensus conceptions of public reason’s structure, however, are likely to protest that abandoning the duty of civility in this way is to effectively abandon the idea of public reason, since there would no longer be any requirement that public policies be justified by appeal to shared or common reasons.