 Secondly, how well does the public reason view handle certain obviously legitimate uses of legal coercion, such as the criminalization of murder and rape? While there is no doubt that a Rawlsian public reason module, duly developed, would straightforwardly deliver the bare bones of coercive laws against murder and rape, can this be done fully and satisfactorily without the sort of recourse to comprehensive moral and metaphysical doctrines Rawls wishes to rule out? Take murder as an example. Standardly murder requires proof of at least causation of death with an intention to kill and penalties are among the severest, stretching in various jurisdictions to mandatory life imprisonment or, in some, to capital punishment. But how is “death” in “causation of death” to be understood? It is common to understand it in terms of the cessation of brain stem functioning. But why this understanding? For some putative victim may have irrevocably lost the capacity for consciousness while his or her brain stem continues to function. Is not the wrong of murder truly captured not only when the brain stem ceases functioning, but (possibly before that) when there is such “irrevocable loss of the capacity of consciousness” (Persson 2002; De Grazia 2017: 4.3)? For, one might say, it is the latter that explains what is horrific about murder. Someone who intentionally brings about the permanent cessation of the brain stem functioning of another should not be thought of as a murderer, the argument goes, where the capacity for consciousness of the victim is already known to have been irrevocably lost. Perhaps such conduct ought still to be criminal and labelled as such, only not as murder meriting the mandatory life sentence. The point for present purposes is not to settle the question of what the best understanding of murder should be, or whether the imaginary case should count as murder, only to suggest that these issues are likely to turn, implicitly or explicitly, on comprehensive moral and metaphysical understandings. Public reason will be insufficient-or so the challenge would run (Tadros 2012: 77). Somewhat relatedly is Rawls’ account of abortion—he argues for a “duly qualified right” on the part of a woman “to decide whether or not to end her pregnancy during the first trimester” (Rawls 1993: 243). Whether Rawls is entitled to this conclusion on the basis of public reason has been hotly contested (see the varying perspectives of George 1997 [1999: 209–213]; J. Williams 2015; Kramer 2017: 92–155; Laborde 2018; Chambers 2018; Arrell 2019).