There is much reasonable disagreement over how, when, and often whether professionals should be disciplined, punished, or formally held accountable for their errors. What follows? In this paper, I draw from recent public reason approaches to coercion, and punishment in particular, to answer that the rules that govern how, when, and whether professionals are (liable) to be disciplined for their errors must be publicly justified–that is, reasonably acceptable, or not reasonably rejectable, by any affected party. However, in contrast to recent consensus liberal approaches to punishment which ground its justification in a Rawlsian “overlapping consensus” of shared liberal values (see, e.g., Chad Flanders and Zachary Hoskins), I draw from the broader convergence liberalism of Gerald Gaus and Kevin Vallier to argue that the rules governing professional discipline need not, for public justification, be based on shared values, but on what all affected would minimally agree to with reasonable views, whether “political” (“public”) or “comprehensive” (“private”). I defend a version of this view on which reasonable rejection of a disciplinary rule (as worse than no rule) defeats that rule, unless it is dictated by a higher-order rule for resolving disagreements over disciplinary rules that could not itself be reasonably rejected.
