  The second formulation is vulnerable to the following objection.  A state might intentionally promote a particular religion, adherence to which was backed by a firm societal consensus.  This state does not look to be a neutral state. The second formulation confronts another problem.  It targets the aims of state officials.  But these aims are not always open to view, and state officials may have a variety of motives in mind when they make political decisions.  For this reason, some have thought that it is more promising to apply the neutrality constraint not to the aims of state officials, but rather to the justifications they give in public for the decisions they make. This yields the third formulation of the neutrality constraint. Defenders of state neutrality often defend the doctrine by appealing to the ideal of public reason. Public reasons, they argue, must be shareable in a way that excludes appeal to controversial ideals of the good. Thus state neutrality and public justification in politics emerge as different sides of the same coin.[10]