Today I turn my attention to the major issue at the heart of Chris Eberle's book Religious Conviction in Liberal Politics. In my earlier posts I noted that there is a lot about which Eberle and other liberal democratic scholars agree concerning the obligations of respectful citizenship. The ideal of conscientious engagement, which I reviewed in my last post, well summarizes the overlap between Eberle and justificatory liberals. Everyone agrees that democratic respect requires that we sympathetically engage other citizens, trying to view the world from their perspective, seeking out reasons that we believe might reasonably persuade them about the justness of the coercive policies that we support.
But here is the rub: justificatory liberals believe that respect requires more than conscientious engagement. Respect also requires that we restrain ourselves from supporting laws solely on the basis of our comprehensive (e.g. religious) beliefs. For justificatory liberals--scholars like John Rawls, Charles Larmore, Robert Audi, Stephen Macedo, Amy Gutmann, Lawrence Solum, and many others--respect requires public justification of coercion (54). The definitions of public justification and its corollary, public reason, are notoriously complex (and there is notable diversity among justificatory liberals about the proper understanding of the terms), but the general idea is that coercive policies need to be justified on bases that other citizens can accept from within their own comprehensive belief systems. If citizens are unable to find reasons that qualify as public in this sense than it is disrespectful for them to continue advocating the policy.
A lot needs to be said about public reason/justification, but I'm setting this aside for a later post. To get closer to the doctrine of restraint, I want us to consider the case of citizen X once again, a deeply committed religious believer whose religious beliefs motivate him to support the enactment of policy Z. Citizen X's religious faith is fundamental to his support of policy Z. Absent his religious faith, in fact, citizen X realizes that he would feel no real need to advocate for the policy. Nevertheless, citizen X holds fast to his religious belief, and he expresses strong public support for policy Z. What does respect require? For justificatory liberals and for Eberle alike, citizen X needs to realize that many of the citizens who will be affected by policy Z do not share his religious beliefs. He needs to take the concerns of these citizens seriously. He needs to respect them by earnestly seeking reasons for the policy that they might find acceptable (even when those reasons are not his own primary reasons for supporting the policy). He needs to engage in imminent critique, finding ways that they might be able to support policy Z from within their own reasonable comprehensive belief system. In short, he must conscientiously engage them.
But what happens if public justification fails? What if citizen X can find no public reasons capable of convincing reasonable citizens? What if the only reasons available to citizen X are those that emerge from his deeply-held religious beliefs? Justificatory liberals say that citizen X should no longer support the public policy. To continue to advocate for policy Z would show disrespect to other citizens. Respect requires that citizen X restrain himself from supporting the policy. Eberle disagrees. Eberle believes that as long as John makes an earnest effort to pursue public justification he has exercised his moral obligations and may continue to push for the enactment of policy Z, even solely on the basis of his religious beliefs.
In my next post I'll give some explanation about why Eberle believes that the doctrine of restraint to be flawed.
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4 comments:
This is interesting, Vic. Thank you for the explanation.
This is kind of an awkward place to interject, but its as good as any I guess.
I think it would be helpful to me to understand what constitutes a "religious" reason.
It seems to me that if a Christian were to advocate a policy on the basis of their beliefs alone, it would still resemble some sort of rational sequence: e.g. "I believe God doesn't want people to murder each other (under x and y conditions) so I therefore advocate a just war policy."
Now, this is a kind of brutish argument (yet typical of what I hear). But it still contains a certain logical structure that can be identified as a form of rationality. Given that the question is about whether a religious person can advocate based on their beliefs alone, sans public reason, we should probably leave the argument in that form and not expand upon it.
The question is, then: why is this not sufficiently rational to satisfy the criterion of public argumentation?
Is it because a public argument answers the "why" (e.g. why does God not want us to kill one another in this particular fashion...)?
I suspect the danger of holding such a reason without a sufficient 'why' is that conversations are immediately shut down. I've been in many of these conversations that end up being more about the assertion of power rather than the search for truth. Nevertheless, not everyone is a world class scholar, but everyone seems entitled to have a public opinion. The form of argument: "I believe x, so I advocate y" seems to meet the basic standards of rationality--and the problems are located not so much on questions or irrationality or rationality, but rather on the conflict of traditions and presuppositions (credit: MacIntyre).
It therefore seems strange to think of even a mean an argument as that one not to be sufficiently public.
I wonder if I'm missing something about what distinguishes a religious argument from a public one. Help?
Brandon, I think there is a difference between the motivational and evidential use of religious reasons. I agree with you that it is rational for a religious believer to be motivated by religious faith (e.g. I believe that the God of Christian scripture exists and that this God calls us to show unremitting regard for the wellbeing of others) to advocate for coercive public policies that correspond at least in part to these beliefs (e.g. I believe that we should have a social welfare system that addresses the needs of the least well off). Most liberals, even the justificatory liberals that Eberle critiques, agree that there is nothing inappropriate about religious citizens being motivated in this way. The problem comes when religious claims serve as the evidential basis for coercive public policy. Justificatory liberals believe that we need public reasons (or, in Audi's words, secular reasons--not the same thing) that justify public policy. It is completely rationale for a religious believer to claim that her religious belief serves as sufficient evidence for the justness of a coercive public policy, but the issue here is not whether or not moving from religious belief to public policy is rational; the issue is whether or not it is respectful of other citizens. The doctrine of restraint entails that religious believers restrain themselves from supporting public policies for which public reasons are unavailable or insufficient to justify the policy. This issue is unrelated to the question of whether or not religious beliefs are rational.
I hasten to add that the same logic applies to secular comprehensive beliefs. Justificatory liberals also call for restraint on the part of secular liberals who would seek to justify coercive public policies on the basis of comprehensive secular beliefs that cannot be publicly justified. I'm reminded of this every time I read books advocates of liberal democratic education who insist that good education requires that we teach children to be skeptical of their parents religious beliefs in order to cultivate them into fully autonomous selves.
That clears up quite a bit, except what a public argument entails. If it is neither comprehensively secular or religious (which, by the way, is a somewhat frustrating dichotomy more or less because I'm pretty "Tillichian" when it comes to defining religion), what exactly is a public argument? I had assumed it meant something which appeals to rationality as a kind of arbiter or acceptable beliefs.
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