How to be a Citizen: Agency, Justice, and Truth in Democratic Politics

This dissertation develops a theory of the moral demands of citizenship in large-scale democracies. It addresses two core questions. The first question is: why should citizens participate in democratic politics despite the fact that their chances of deciding the outcomes of elections is vanishingly small? I answer that citizens must participate in order to do their fair shares of the demands of making their laws and political institutions more just. The second question is: how should citizens participate in light of the existence of widespread moral and philosophical disagreement in all large-scale democracies? I argue that citizens ought to advance conceptions of justice that take proper account of the ideal of public reason