In contrast with public reasons, there are non-public reasons. These reasons are controversial, in the sense that they are not reasons that we can expect all reasonable citizens to accept. Their possibility emerges from the fact of reasonable pluralism (Rawls 1996: 36–39), which refers to the idea that, in any society in which basic rights are protected, citizens will inevitably disagree about the worth of competing conceptions of the good life. The doctrine of public reason states that, because certain reasons are controversial, we ought not to appeal to them when making the case for the political legislation we support. In this respect, the doctrine calls for a kind of justificatory restraint (Rawls 1996: 447).[62]