 The idea of public reason is often presented as a normative ideal, as the way our moral or political rules ought, ideally, to be justified, and also as the way individuals ought, ideally, to engage in deliberation and discussion. Rawls, for example, stipulates that his account of public reason “belongs to a conception of a well-ordered constitutional democratic society” (Rawls 1999b, 573), by which he means a society where: (a) everyone accepts, and knows that others accept, the same conception of justice (or at least everyone accepts some member from the family of liberal conceptions); (b) the basic structure of society is publicly known to satisfy this conception and; (c) citizens have a normally effective sense of justice (Rawls 1996, 35).