 On Rawls’s influential account, reasonable persons represent the constituency of public reason. Reasonable persons are defined by their acceptance of two main ideas. First, reasonable persons are, when among equals, “ready to propose principles and standards as fair terms of cooperation and to abide by them willingly, given the assurance that others will likewise do so. Those norms they view as reasonable for everyone to accept and therefore as justifiable to them; and they are ready to discuss the fair terms that others propose” (Rawls 1996, 49). Second, reasonable persons accept what Rawls calls the burdens of judgment and “accept their consequences for the use of public reason in directing the legitimate exercise of political power in a constitutional regime” (Rawls 1996, 54). The burdens of judgment are the many “hazards involved in the correct (and conscientious) exercise of our powers of reason and judgment in the ordinary course of political life,” (Rawls 1996, 55–56) which explain how reasonable and rational people will permanently disagree about many matters of value and ethics. Rawls’s list of the burdens includes the following facts: (a) empirical and scientific evidence is often complex and conflicting; (b) we may reasonably disagree about the relative weight of different considerations; (c) concepts are vague and subject to hard cases; (d) the way we assess evidence and weigh values can be shaped by our total life experience; (e) different normative considerations on different sides can make overall assessment difficult; and (f) the number of values any social institution can incorporate is limited (Rawls 1996, 56–57). The burdens of judgment explain why reasonable and rational people will be permanently divided over matters of philosophy, religion, and other aspects of the good life. Because reasonable persons accept these two ideas, Rawls suggests they will also accept the idea of public reason—the only terms of social cooperation that will seem fair given the burdens of judgment will be terms that can be justified by appeal to ideals or arguments that all reasonable persons can accept. Reasonable persons will thus eschew appeals to religious ideas or other controversial claims over which reasonable persons are assumed to disagree, and instead appeal only to those public or political ideas that are part of a liberal democratic political culture and can be assumed acceptable to all persons as reasonable and rational (Rawls 1996, 217).