Many democratic theorists hold that when a decision is collectively made in the right kind of way, in accordance with the right procedure, it is permissible to enforce it. They deny that there are further requirements on the type of reasons that can permissibly be used to justify laws and policies. In this paper, I argue that democratic theorists are mistaken about this. So-called public reason requirements follow from commitments that most of them already hold. Drawing on the democratic ideal (...) of civic equality, I show that it can successfully explain why political decision-making must have the right sort of procedure-independent justification. However, contra standard accounts of public reason, I argue that laws and policies need to be justified with convergence accessible, not shared, reasons. Public reasons are those that are accessible in light of evaluative standards shared by all, or in light of every citizen’s private evaluative standards. Since this will make the set of public reasons wider, it makes the theory more palatable to sceptics while retaining the framework’s justificatory potential. (shrink)

John Tillson argues, on grounds of children’s well-being, that it is impermissible to teach them religious views. I defend a practice of pluralistically advocating religious views to children. As long as there are no monopolies of influence over children, and as long as advocates do not use coercion, deceit, or manipulation, children can greatly benefit without having their rational abilities subverted, or incurring undue risk to form false beliefs. This solution should counter, to some extent, both perfectionist and antiperfectionist reasons (...) against initiating children into religions. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new account of gender identity on which for A to have gender G as part of their gender identity is for A to not take G not to fit them (or to positively take G to fit them). It argues that this subjective fit account of gender identity fits well with trans people’s testimony and both trans and cis people’s experiences of their genders. The subjective fit account also avoids the problems that existing accounts of gender (...) identity face. Existing accounts face broadly two types of problems. First, they seem to imply that trans people have gender identities different from those that they in fact have. For instance, they seem to imply that some trans women do not have a female gender identity or have not always had that gender identity, contrary to their testimony and experiences. I argue that the subjective fit account avoids this problem. Second, many existing accounts of gender identity seem to conflict with the idea that our gender identities merit respect. I argue that the subjective fit account avoids this problem because it understands gender identities to consist in normative experiences and judgments and normative experiences and judgments merit respect. (shrink)

Gender-affirming healthcare interventions are medical or surgical interventions that aim to allow trans and non-binary people to better affirm their gender identity. It has been argued that rights to GAH must be grounded in either a right to be cured of or mitigate an illness—gender dysphoria—or in harm prevention, given the high rates of depression and suicide among trans and non-binary people. However, these grounds of a right to GAH conflict with the prevalent view among theorists, institutions and activists that (...) trans and non-binary people do not have a mental illness and that one can be trans and entitled to GAH without being depressed or suicidal. This paper challenges the orthodoxy that a right to GAH must be grounded in either of these ways and instead argues for a right to GAH grounded in a right to live and act with integrity. The standard view, which this paper explains, is that our rights to live and act with integrity ground a right to religious accommodation in many cases such as a right to not be denied social security due to one’s refusal to work a job on a holy day. This paper argues that if our rights to live and act with integrity can ground prima facie rights to religious accommodation, our rights to live and act with integrity ground prima facie rights to GAH. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the objection that unilateral secession by a national group (e.g., the Scots) from a legitimate, nonusurping state would wrong minority nationalities within the seceding territory. I show first that most proponents of this objection assume that the ground of the right to national self-determination is the protection of the group’s culture. I show that there are alternative justifications available. I then set out a version of this objection that does not rely on this claim; on (...) this objection, a national minority that seceded and created its own state would commit an expressive wrong against minorities within the territory over which it claimed jurisdiction. I show that this objection is undermotivated: only under a specific set of circumstances would the minorities of the secessionist region be subject to an expressive wrong. Finally, I show that the correct way to think about the claims of minorities in secessionist regions is in terms of a claim to secure access to equal civic status such that they are not at risk of becoming justifiably alienated from their new state. If a secessionist group cannot provide this guarantee to the minority residents of their territory, then their seceding would commit wrongful harm, and the presumption in favour of collective autonomy is defeated. I call this defeater the ‘Alienation Defeater.’With this in hand, we are now in a position to explain why nations are normatively special. Responding to the objections broached by Allen Buchanan and others, I show that even if other kinds of groups, such as religious groups, have the features in virtue of which nations have a claim to self-determination, this does not entail that those groups also have the right to secede. This is because an account of self-determination needs a list of ‘defeaters’—features in virtue of which a group’s claim to self-determination is defeated. I argue that religious groups are the strongest candidate for having a claim to collective autonomy in virtue of sharing many features with nations. I then argue that religious groups will run afoul of the Alienation Defeater; religious identity is too narrow to be the basis of the dominant collective identity of a state. This does not apply to nationality. This, I explain, is because of qualitative differences between religious groups, qua religious groups, and nations. (shrink)

Political theory is contextualist when factual claims about context are part of the justification of normative political judgments. There are different kinds of contextualism depending on whether context is relevant for the formulation and justification of political principles, whether principles themselves are contextually specific, or whether context is only relevant for the application of principles. An important challenge to contextualism is the problem of critical distance: how can theories ensure a critical perspective if facts about the context to be evaluated (...) are also part of the justification for the normative judgments? Tariq Modood and Simon Thompson have defended what they call iterative contextualism, which combines elements of all three kinds of contextualism in an attempt to avoid the problem of critical distance. The present paper discusses Modood and Thompson’s iterative contextualism and whether it manages to avoid the problem of critical distance. (shrink)

Public reason liberals disagree about the relationship between public justification and deliberative democracy. My goal is to argue against the recent suggestion that public reason liberals seek a ‘divorce’ from deliberative democracy. Defending this thesis will involve discussing the benefits of deliberation for public justification as well as revisiting public reason’s standard Rawlisan restraint requirement. I criticize Kevin Vallier’s alternative convergence-based principle of restraint and respond to the worry that the standard Rawlsian restraint requirement reduces the likelihood of public justification (...) by limiting the diversity of inputs into the justificatory process. (shrink)

This paper critically evaluates two aspects of Maxime Lepoutre's important book, Democratic Speech in Divided Times. First, I examine Lepoutre's approach to the shared reasons constraint—the requirement to offer shared reasons within public deliberation—and the place of emotions in public discourse. I argue that he, and indeed all who adopt such a highly inclusivist approach, face a dilemma that pushes him either to apply the shared reasons constraint more widely than he desires or to abandon it completely. I chart a (...) course through this dilemma, but one that involves significant revisions to Lepoutre's position, particularly regarding the need for idealization. Second, I consider Lepoutre's use of the systemic approach to public discourse, which is central to many of his arguments, including his responses to critics of the discursive democratic ideal. Using his arguments regarding angry speech and dogmatic group cognition as illustrative, I highlight the somewhat speculative nature of these systemic arguments, which often rely on conjectures about how the system might operate, how its parts fit together, and how the system as a whole might attenuate seemingly problematic features of its component parts. This limits the ultimate persuasiveness of Lepoutre's responses to skepticism about democratic speech in our divided times. (shrink)

Cécile Laborde has argued that the freedom we think of as ‘freedom of religion’ should be understood as a bundle of separate and relatively independent freedoms. I criticise that approach by pointing out that it is insufficiently sensitive to facts about the sorts of entities that liberal states are. I argue that states have good reasons to mould phenomena such as religion into easily governable monoliths. If this is a problem from the normative point of view, it is not due (...) to descriptively inadequate accounts of religion, but a problem with a lack of realism about the sort of institutions states are. My conclusion is a three-way disjunction: either one must reckon with liberal states’ historically determined limitations in the management of changing social phenomena, or one should direct one’s frustration at the marriage of liberalism and the state, or the very existence of states is normatively problematic. (shrink)

How should liberal-democratic governments deal with emerging vaccination hesitancy when that leads to the resurgence of diseases that for decades were under control? This article argues that vaccination policies should be justified in terms of a proper weighing of the rights of children to be protected against vaccine-preventable diseases and the rights of parents to raise their children in ways that they see fit. The argument starts from the concept of the ‘best interests of the child involved’. The concept is (...) elaborated for this context into the dual regime structure in which parents have fiduciary authority over what they consider to be best for their child, and the state has fiduciary authority over a child’s basic interests. This argument leads to conditional mandatory vaccination programs that should be informed by a correct balancing of the two legal principles of proportionality and precaution. This results in contextual childhood vaccination policies of upscaling interference: a three-tiered approach of increased intrusion, from voluntary program when possible and mandatory or even compulsory programs when necessary to protect the child’s basic interests. (shrink)

John Rawls’s political liberalism demands that reasonable citizens comply with the duty of civility, which limits the justification of state action to public reasons. However, many religious citizens in liberal democratic societies reject the exclusion of religious reasons from public debate. What can be done to encourage these citizens to endorse public reason? Rawls proposes the idea of reasoning from conjecture (RC), i.e. directly engaging with someone’s comprehensive doctrine and showing them that such a doctrine actually supports public reason. In (...) this article, we argue that reasoning from conjecture faces serious objections and that interfaith dialogue (ID) provides a better and more effective tool to encourage religious citizens to endorse public reason. More specifically, ID provides support to public reason by (i) relying on the principles of equality, sincerity and self-criticism, which are also central to public reason; (ii) leading participants to de-parochialize religion; and (iii) promoting tolerance. Moreover, ID avoids the main objections faced by RC, which undermine the latter’s morality and effectiveness. (shrink)

The status of scientific knowledge in political liberalism is controversial. Although Rawls argued that the noncontroversial methods and conclusions of science belong to the kind of reasons that citizens can legitimately call forth in public deliberation, critics have observed that the complexity and elaborateness of scientific arguments drive them away from the spirit of public reason, i.e., that which should reflect judgments that are the product of general beliefs and forms of reasoning found in common sense. In other words, scientific (...) claims remain as inaccessible as esoteric or religious reasons. This paper contends that this objection can be met by introducing a crucial assumption, drawn from W. V. O. Quine and the ‘naturalized epistemology’ tradition: that scientific reasoning and everyday reasoning are not two different epistemic categories but rather form a continuum. The former is just a filtered or refined version of the latter. Accordingly, evidence-based scientific reasoning is common to all citizens, regardless of their actual acceptance of specific scientific claims. Following the Quinean Assumption, political liberals may argue that, unlike religious or esoteric sources of knowledge, scientific reasoning is the expression of a cognitive operation that is fundamentally shared across comprehensive doctrines and politically reasonable individuals. (shrink)

The defection thesis holds that members of marginalized social groups are obligated not to express views important to others in the group that are regarded by the others as substantively wrong. In this essay, I evaluate arguments that seek to vindicate the defection thesis and conclude they all fail. Then, I argue that we have reason to believe sanctioning defectors in certain ways is wrongful and that the expression of their contentious ideas is good for members of marginalized groups. We (...) are left to conclude both that members of marginalized groups have no obligation to suppress certain heterodox views and that it is likely wrong to sanction them for expressing these views even if it were wrong for them to do so. (shrink)

Ryan Muldoon has recently advanced an interesting and original bargaining model of the social contract as an alternative to Rawlsian social contract theory and political liberalism. This model is s...

The standard liberal egalitarian approach to religious exemptions from generally applicable laws implies that such exemptions may be necessary in the name of equal respect for each citizen’s conscience. In each particular case this approach requires balancing the claims of devout believers against the countervailing claims of other citizens. I contend, firstly, that under the conditions of deep moral and ideological disagreement the balancing procedure proves to be extremely inconclusive. It does not provide an unequivocal solution even in the imaginary (...) case based on the biblical story of Abraham’s sacrifice, not to speak of real-life cases that are far less suggestive. Secondly, I argue that it is possible to consider demands for religious exemptions respectfully, without even challenging the way they are justified, but still reject them for principled reasons—namely, because these demands cannot be met without arbitrarily bending popular sovereignty to the dictate of religious doctrines. (shrink)

Religious associations sometimes seek to provide services and goods to the public using religious values that discriminate on grounds otherwise prohibited by law and public values. 'Group pluralists' support these efforts by highlighting the importance of shielding group authority from state overreach and protecting a robust associational life within democratic contexts. By contrast, 'liberal statists' insist on the state's final authority over societal groups and the need to protect individuals from arbitrary group power. This paper defends a third approach to (...) group authority called relational pluralism. Relational pluralism is skeptical that the state can resolve group conflicts fully and fairly and recognizes that too much state interference in group life weakens democratic relations. At the same time, it recognizes that groups can rarely act independently of other groups, including the regulatory state. Instead, groups rely on being empowered by other groups and often also by the state to carry out their projects. Group authority is nearly always 'relational' in that it depends on the cooperation of other groups. The paper sketches out a relational pluralist approach to understanding group authority and explains its democratic virtues. It shows how the approach can illuminate otherwise underappreciated features of conflicts about authority. (shrink)

In this paper we put forward a realist account of the problem of the accommodation of conflicting claims over sacred places. Our argument takes its cue from the empirical finding that modern, Western-style states necessarily mould religion into shapes that are compatible with state rule. So, at least in the context of modern states there is no pre-political morality of religious freedom that states ought to follow when adjudicating claims over sacred spaces. In which case most liberal normative theory on (...) religious accommodation turns out to be wrong headed. As an alternative, we suggest the question of contested sacred places should be settled with reference to the state’s purposes—at least as long as one is committed to the existence of modern states. If one finds the state’s treatment of religion unsatisfactory, then our argument provides a pro tanto reason for seeking alternative forms of political organisation. (shrink)

Habermas’ ‘ethics of citizenship’ raises a number of relevant concerns about the dangers of a secularistic exclusion of religious contributions to public deliberation, on the one hand, and the dangers of religious conflict and sectarianism in politics, on the other. Agreeing largely with these concerns, the paper identities four problems with Habermas’ approach, and attempts to overcome them: the full exclusion of religious reasons from parliamentary debate; the full inclusion of religious reasons in the informal public sphere; the philosophical distinction (...) between secular and religious reasons; and the sociological distinction between ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ religions. The result is a revised version of the ethics of citizenship, which I call moderate inclusivism. Most notably, moderate inclusivism implies a replacement of Habermas’ ‘institutional translation proviso’ with a more flexible ‘conversational translation proviso’. (shrink)

Political philosophers have long disagreed on the issue of whether churches should exercise restraint in the appeal to religious reasons in public discussion and political mobilization. Exclusivists defend the restraint, whereas inclusivists reject it. Both sides, however, assume the existence of a democratic government. In this essay, I discuss whether churches should exercise restraint in a non-democratic, authoritarian society. I defend inclusivism and believe that churches should not restrain themselves, especially when doing so can promote democracy and prevent severe injustices. (...) First, I argue that two exclusivist arguments which justify the restraint cannot be applied in an authoritarian society. Second, I defend inclusivism because religious reasons are effective in cultivating active citizens that strengthen the democratic movement. Finally, I use the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong as an example to show how inclusivism can enhance democratic movements under authoritarianism. (shrink)

It is common for religiously motivated actions to be specially protected by law. Many legal theorists have asked why: what makes religion special? What makes it worthy of toleration over and above other non-religious deeply held convictions? The answer I put forward is that religions’ alleged afterlife consequences call for a principle of toleration that warrants special legal treatment. Under a Rawlsian principle of toleration, it is reasonable for those in the original position to opt for principles of justice that (...) accommodate actions with alleged afterlife consequences. And, under a utilitarian principle of toleration, a greater psychological harm is eased by such accommodations. Additionally, this alleged afterlife consequence is found in most of the religions that are thought to warrant some level of special toleration—not only do the Abrahamic religions have alleged afterlife consequences, but many eastern religions do as well, e.g. reincarnation. (shrink)

The paper offers a critical engagement with Cécile Laborde’s book, Liberalism’s Religion. It elaborates several objections to Laborde’s account of religious accommodations, and sketches an alternative approach.

This paper investigates the right of exit from religious associations. The liberal state has a compelling interest in overseeing exit, even if it implies some loss in religious group autonomy. Members should not be bound by rules they find unconscionable. They should be free to leave and able to do so. To enable exit, the paper advocates the use of membership contracts. Religious associations should issue a contract for members working for, residing in, or donating money to the association under (...) a regime of legal exemptions. The membership contract publicises the right of exit and offers a basis for negotiating and contesting its terms. It makes exit less “unthinkable” to members and helps tackle unreasonable economic costs to exit. (shrink)

Being robustly committed to state neutrality which does not permit the promotion of liberal-perfectionist ideals and denying that there is anything normatively relevant or ‘special’ about religion leaves liberal-egalitarians embroiled in a paradox. If religion is not special, how and why do liberal states afford it differential treatment (in comparison with non-religious analogues like secular doctrines or deeply-held beliefs of individual conscience)? This paper explores liberal-egalitarian strategies for resolving this paradox with predominant reference to the disaggregation strategy advanced by Cécile (...) Laborde. After discussing the novelty and advantages of disaggregation relative to other liberal-egalitarian strategies, the paper distinguishes between the coverage and the basis in justification of differential treatment to argue that disaggregation does not ultimately succeed in solving the latter. Despite this, reflecting on the clarifications achieved through disaggregation and the deeper issues of justification and justice emerging therefrom, the paper concludes by proposing the need to consider a lateral solution to the paradox and speculating on what this might look like. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the debate on the accessibility of religious reasons, as it exists within the public reason literature, has insufficiently identified what it is that makes a religious reason for political action accessible. I thus explore a new route of analysis, one that takes seriously how religious reasons can be accessed via emotion. Emotions, I claim, are not only a source of justification for believers, but they allow non-religious citizens to feel the force of religious reasons (...) more than they otherwise would. (shrink)

The idea that the state ought to be neutral towards different conceptions of the good life has been an influential principle in liberal theory since the 1970s. It has, however, been subject to criticism by communitarians, multiculturalists and liberal perfectionists. Recently, Peter Balint has attempted to defend state neutrality against its liberal critics as the adequate interpretation of the liberal project by redefining it as a range concept. By arguing that neutrality always occurs within a specific range of permissible conceptions (...) of the good life, Balint provides a convincing rebuttal of neutrality’s critics. In this paper I argue that while neutrality as a range concept provides an adequate account of state neutrality, it also makes it vulnerable to a new line of critique. Since the range of neutrality cannot be deduced from the principle of neutrality itself, neutrality is subject to political developments beyond its own control. I will start by clarifying the notion of neutrality as a range concept. Secondly, I will demonstrate that Balint’s notion of the range concept finds ample support in the wider literature on neutrality. Thirdly, I will argue that, as a range concept, neutrality ultimately depends on politically constituted value judgments. (shrink)

Mandatory reporting laws are one of the main tools that governments in the US use to curb abuse. While clergy have historically been exempted from these laws, this privilege has increasingly come under fire. This essay argues a certain degree of clergy privilege is warranted. Specifically, it argues three main points. First, laws that require every adult to report credible evidence of abuse are problematic and ought to be repealed. Second, if religion is special, there should be widespread exemptions for (...) clergy from mandatory reporting laws. Third, if religion is not special, confessors should still be exempt from mandatory reporting laws. One of the upshots of this essay is that, regardless of whether religion is special, confessors should not be obligated to report abuse heard in the confessional. (shrink)

‘Transformative liberals’ believe that the state should use its non-coercive capacities to counter hateful speech and practices, by seeking to transform the views of those who hold hateful and discriminatory beliefs. This paper critically assesses transformative liberalism, with a particular focus on the theory developed by Corey Brettschneider. For Brettschneider, the state should engage in ‘democratic persuasion’ by speaking out against views that are incompatible with the ideal of free and equal citizenship, and refusing to fund or subsidise civil society (...) groups that hold such views. My critique has five parts. I first rebut two central justifications for transformative liberalism, regarding complicity and the undermining of equal citizenship. Second, I show that some of the central policies that Brettschneider advocates are in fact coercive. Third, I raise concerns about the nature of the complex and contestable judgments that transformative liberalism requires the state to make. Fourth, I argue that Brettschneider’s view has various troubling implications. Finally, I argue that many of these problems derive from his adoption of a thick conception of free and equal citizenship, resulting in an overly broad definition of hateful viewpoints and of hate speech. A defensible version of transformative liberalism would use a significantly narrower conception. (shrink)

Many liberals and secularists believe that religious schooling should not be publicly funded or that it should simply be banned. Challenging those views, I claim that although liberal states may refuse to fund and may even ban certain illiberal separate religious schools, it is impermissible, for distinctively liberal reasons, to completely ban publicly funded religious schooling. I will however argue that providing religious instruction within common public schools is more desirable than having separate religious schools. I argue that providing religious (...) instruction within common public schools is a better way to balance the educational interests of parents, children and society than banning religious schooling altogether; authorizing it but refusing to fund it; or having publicly funded separate religious schools. (shrink)

The paper discusses Rawls’ and Habermas’ theories of deliberative democracy, focusing on the question of religious reasons in political discourse. Whereas Rawls as well as Habermas defend a fully inclusivist position on the use of religious reasons in the ‘background culture’ or ‘informal public sphere’, we defend a moderately inclusivist position. Moderate inclusivism welcomes religiously inspired contributions to public debate, but it also makes normative demands on public argumentation beyond the ‘public forum’ or ‘formal public sphere’. In particular, moderate inclusivism (...) implies what we call a ‘conversational translation proviso’ according to which citizens have a duty to supplement religious with proper political arguments if – but only if – they are asked to do so by their co-discussants. This position, we argue, is more in line with the deeper intuitions behind Rawls’ political liberalism and Habermas’ deliberative model than is the fully inclusivist alternative. _Keywords_: conversational translation proviso, deliberative democracy, ethics of citizenship, Habermas, moderate inclusivism, public reason, Rawls. (shrink)

Many believe that it is wrong for parents to prevent their children from associating with other adults. Many also believe that it is wrong for parents to prevent their children from continuing to associate with adults whose association with them is crucial to the children’s well-being. Call these adults the important associates of children. In this essay, I will argue that the considerations favoring the two judgments just mentioned also favor a further judgment. In particular, I will argue that important (...) associates are presumptively obligated to continue associating with the children to whom they are important associates. This means that the important associates of children who dissolve their association with a child without proper justification wrong these children by doing so. (shrink)

An important question for liberal political theory is whether its account of political morality is compatible with religious political thought. This paper examines one aspect of that broad question, namely the compatibility of the Christian pluralist tradition with liberalism's account of state sovereignty. According to Cécile Laborde, a central commitment of liberalism—and perhaps its most radical—is the claim that the state possesses a form of sovereignty that she dubs ‘competence-competence’. This refers to the state's meta-jurisdictional authority to decide the areas (...) of competence of associations within it. The Christian pluralist tradition, in contrast, emphasises the independent authority of various kinds of social groups and the external limits this places on the state. The paper argues that, despite appearances to the contrary and the claims of many pluralist thinkers, these two views are compatible. It does so through a detailed examination of the two main strands of Christian pluralism, namely subsidiarity and sphere sovereignty, and by comparing pluralists’ and liberals’ approaches to the regulation of religious groups. (shrink)

This essay explores and criticizes Matteo Bonotti’s argument that parties and partisans in a publicly justified polity should appeal primarily, if not exclusively, to accessible justificatory reasons to fulfill their political duties. I argue that political parties should only support coercive policies if they rationally believe that the coercive law or policy in question can be publicly justified to those subject to the law or policy in terms of their own private—specifically intelligible—reasons. I then explore four practical differences between our (...) two approaches. In contrast to Bonotti’s accessible reasons approach, the intelligibility approach facilitates the provision of assurance between citizens and political officials, requires that parties and partisans support fewer coercive policies, allows more exemptions from generally applicable laws, and facilitates logrolling and alliance formation. (shrink)

The so-called liberal-communitarian debate in the 1980s was one of the most remarkable debates in Anglo-American political philosophy. While John Rawls was the most well-known thinker from the liberal camp, it can be said that Michael J. Sandel best represented the communitarian critique of Rawls' political theory. Nevertheless, for many scholars, especially liberal political theorists, Sandel's criticism of Rawls is misleading in many aspects due to his misunderstanding of Rawls' theory. This paper wants to reexamine this allegation against Sandel by (...) dealing with three objections against Sandel's criticism of Rawls claiming that Sandel misreads and misunderstands Rawls. The sociology objection interprets Sandel as saying that Rawls' conception of the person reflects a sociological account of humans. The metaphysics objection interprets Sandel as saying that Rawls' conception of the person explains a metaphysical account of humans. The private morality objection interprets Sandel as saying that Rawls' conception of the person reflects a moral ideal of humans. This paper offer a careful rereading of Sandel, and argues that he does not misread or misunderstand Rawls as his critics claim. Therefore, these three objections are misleading. (shrink)

The right to religious liberty as for instance set out in the European Convention of Human Rights protects acts of religious observance. Such protection can clash with other considerations, including laws aimed at protecting other state interests. Religious freedom therefore requires an account of when the right should lead to exemptions from other laws and when the right can legitimately be limited. Alan Patten has proposed a Fair Opportunity view of the normative logic of religious liberty. But Patten’s view faces (...) several problems. The normative work in his view is mainly done by added accounts of reasonable claims and of justifiability. So, the Fair Opportunity view in itself does not provide a normative criterion. Defenses of the Fair Opportunity view must therefore turn on the theoretical preferability of its structural features. But the Fair Opportunity view has the wrong form to capture the right to freedom of religion. The form of the right to freedom of religion is due to how its point is to address how states limit the liberty of citizens. Given a practice dependent approach, which assigns importance to the point and purpose of the right to freedom of religion, Patten’s theory is thus problematic. (shrink)

Many of the most influential theorists of linguistic justice make arguments on the basis of comparisons between language and religion. They claim either that (1) language, by contrast with religion, cannot be separated from the state or that (2) unequal official linguistic recognition, just like unequal official religious recognition, is morally problematic. This article argues that careful attention to debates about liberalism and the place of religion in public life invites us to question the two above-mentioned liberal assumptions about religion (...) underlying many arguments concerning linguistic justice based on (dis)analogies between language and religion. The hope is that such critical scrutiny is likely to shed some light on normative questions of linguistic justice, more precisely on questions about the legitimacy of granting more recognition to certain languages, usually those of national native groups (as opposed to groups resulting from more or less recent immigration). (shrink)

This paper introduces a novel account of freedom of dissociation, construed as the “right to a fair exit.” It defines freedom of dissociation as the right to end an association without excessive and undue costs. This novel account contrasts with the classic right of exit that some liberal philosophers have theorized as the bedrock of associational freedom. The original right of exit is first and foremost concerned with the protection against excessive exit costs, while the right to a fair exit (...) broadens its scope to include undue costs as well. State policy should aim at monitoring and resourcing exit not only to ensure that leavers have adequate exit options, but also that the costs of exit are fairly divided between parties. This account illuminates a range of cases, such as divorce, dissolution of employment contracts, and contested exits from religious associations. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate whether there are nonreligious, epistemic reasons that could justify consulting religious traditions. In this way, I supplement the ongoing debate on the value of tradition, which has focused mostly on practical values for maintaining traditions, with an examination of epistemic reasons for consulting traditions. To do so, I focus on the problem-solving aspect of religious traditions and their epistemic resources. I discuss whether consulting traditions of religious wisdom, religious practical knowledge, religious institutions, or religious rationalities (...) can be justified based on their continuous transmission, the test of time, an intergenerational learning process, or moral enquiry. (shrink)

Of the many questions Cécile Laborde addresses in her magisterial Liberalism’s Religion, several relate to what she describes as ‘the puzzle of exemptions’. I examine some of the issues raised by her efforts to solve that puzzle: whether her ideal of moral integrity squares with the nature of religious belief; whether we should find the case for collective religious exemptions in freedom of association and the ‘coherence interests’ of associations; how much significance we should give to the ‘competence interests’ of (...) organised religions; and by which criteria we should assess individual claims to religious exemption. (shrink)

Most debates surrounding the teaching of creationism in the science classroom have been addressed under a standard frame: whether creationism is science or religion. As creationism suggests supernatural causation, it has been understood as beyond the purview of science, and therefore as religion. This argument for methodological naturalism has been increasingly challenged by philosophers of science as a demarcation criterion. The disaggregation approach introduced by Cecile Laborde provides an alternative framework to address this debate. It suggests that the problem with (...) creationism lies in its epistemic inaccessibility, as it is a theory with weak explanatory capacity that has been superseded by Darwinian evolution. Thus, the exclusion of creationism from the science classroom is not grounded in its religious character, but rather in a set of epistemic shortcomings, which are shared by other fully secular pseudoscientific theories. In the same way that religion is not special as a legal-political category under Laborde’s analysis, creationism in the curriculum should not be treated as special either. (shrink)

In this introduction, we provide a brief overview of the debate on religion in political philosophy. We present the main arguments defended by Cécile Laborde in Liberalism’s Religion and explain how these arguments contribute to the debate.