At issue is whether it is necessary separate religious ideals from secular ones in public debate in order to prevent the religiously motivated from infringing on the rights of others. To this end, Robert Audi urges the employment of the twin principles of “secular rationale” and “secular motivation.” The former means that all propositions in a public debate should be argued on secular merits, and the latter means that those merits alone must be a sufficiently compelling motivation for the advocacy lent a particular policy, not the motivation provided by a covert religious agenda. John Rawls recommends that debate about constitutional principles be limited to “public reason,” that is ideas that are not the product of any “comprehensive doctrine,” religious or secular. Opposing them, Philip Quinn and others advocate that only the barest of restraints be placed on public debate. I shall consider each system in turn before advancing my thesis that for both theoretical and practical reasons, it is not only undesirable to exclude comprehensive doctrines from public debate, but it is ultimately impossible as well. Instead, there is no method to create and maintain a liberal polity other than cultivating a liberal populace, and having a liberal populace—that is to say, a populace that respects the rights and preferences of minority groups—is in turn dependent on articulating many arguments for liberalism in such a way that each has maximum appeal to its intended segment of the population.

While Audi’s principles may be useful in certain circumstances, it seems odd that his rules are focused exclusively on religion. If it is true that religious arguments should be excluded from public debate because they cannot be accepted all members of society, then certainly there are secular arguments that are similarly controversial, and thus must also be excluded. Audi’s requirements are not strict enough to ensure universal acceptability. A Randian might still object to the public promotion of utilitarianism, a utilitarian might object to the promotion of Kantian values, and so forth. Audi’s view is too narrowly focused on religious views as uniquely controversial though there are numerous comprehensive doctrines that, though secular, are not universally accepted.

Quinn outlines his case by noting objections to Audi and Rawls. Essentially, Quinn sees Audi and Rawls as proposing a voluntary censorship for those who have political views that cannot be justified in secular terms. For example, Rawls claims in a footnote that the abortion debate can be resolved as a constitutional matter by appealing to public reason. It is a simple matter of balancing the rights of a woman with the good of letting the fetus develop. Thus, concludes Rawls, abortion should not be prohibited. However, the view set forth by Rawls presupposes a comprehensive framework for interpreting the rights of a fetus. In a case such as this, there is no way to make an argument that does not invoke some comprehensive doctrine, since the rights of fetuses (or lack thereof) are not part of a commonly agreed upon framework for debate at this time. Continuing the example of abortion, were someone to oppose a constitutional guarantee of a right to abortion on purely religious grounds, Audi and Rawls would have her bow out of the debate until she can provide a non-religious and non-comprehensive argument for such opposition. However, to ask a rational member of liberal society to refrain from participating in the dialogue of democracy, it seems that a strong justification is required. Moreover, this exclusion of religiously motivated speech seems even harder to rationalize in light of the eminent controversy of some secular arguments and the apparent universality of some religious doctrines. Quinn asserts there is no basis for excluding certain accepted arguments due to their religious nature while simultaneously allowing more controversial arguments due to their purportedly secular nature. Similarly, to restrict the debate to only universally accepted propositions is to void the debate, since reasonable people disagree about nearly everything. Public reason, argues Quinn, is too weak a foundation on which to build liberal society. Both Audi and Rawls craft exceptions to their exclusionary systems to improve their general acceptability, says Quinn, but it would be easier to abandon the systems all together. Certainly, historically in America, a semi-liberal democracy has held together in spite of whatever pressures have been put on it by those who have used religious language as a part of public discourse. If anything allowing more dialogue is helpful, as it encourages more comprehensive frameworks to incorporate liberal principles independently.

Even accepting that matters other than comprehensive doctrines can also be highly controversial, it can still be claimed that they deserve special exclusion because they are qualitatively different from other controversial ideas, in that other ideas can be tested empirically. However, if constitutional justifications relying on concepts that are outside the realm of Popperian falsification were stricken from consideration, it would result in the paralysis of the state, for the reason that facts are only useful for the creation of policy in the degree to which they help us realize some goal, and goals are intrinsically non-empirical. Without some goal in mind, no quantity of facts, non-controversial or otherwise, can provide no guideline to legislation. Thus, at the minimum, some small number of non-publicly verifiable goals must be given exemption.

It might then be proposed that liberalism need only find and allow the use of those goals that are commonly held by all. Alternatively, it might be proposed that the bare minimum goals needed to establish a liberal state should be found. The first proposed set of exemptions is clearly nonviable, since we know both a priori and from experience that there are no goals held in common by absolutely all. Even goals as strongly and widely endorsed as life and happiness have some opponents. If there were already a common set of goals held by all, then there would already be consensus about the nature of good life, and hence no need to implement the liberal compromise. Liberalism is the result of a lack of consensus about the nature of the good life, not a surplus.

The second proposed set of exemptions also fails because goals of one sort or another, no matter how limited in scope or seemingly universal, necessarily put outer limits on the acceptable means of pursuing the good life. For example, by having the goal of allowing people to live without the fear of external violence, we necessarily block the pursuit of the vision of the good life held by those who believe in involuntary human sacrifice, though this an occasional feature of numerous religions in the pre-modern era. Though liberal goals are small in scope and consist in the main of allowing people to live together peaceably, these goals nevertheless necessarily prohibit the pursuit of goals that are contrary to them. Therefore, no matter how minimal the set of societal goals proposed, innumerable other goals will be precluded. Given that the pursuit of some goals precludes the opportunity of pursuing others, we must find some way of determining which set of goals are worth permitting. However, in doing so, we have necessarily created a meta-framework about the sort of goals allowable, thus violating our premise that comprehensive doctrines are by their qualitative nature unsuited for justification within a liberal constitution. From this failure we can see that it is quixotic in the extreme to try to remove all comprehensive schemes from the justification of legislation for the simple reason that liberal aims are themselves comprehensive in their desire to allow the pursuit of a plurality of individually chosen goals.

Still, a liberalism that makes life safe for liberals and those not antagonistic to liberalism is not to be undervalued. Recall that the impetus for forming liberalism in the first place was the desire to escape the internecine warfare of the early modern era. The compromise that slowly emerged was the non-interference of government in matters of conscience. At first, this was purely justified on Christian grounds that salvation was an individual matter, not a collective one, so it was counterproductive to enforce membership in particular sects of Protestantism. As time went on, this compromise expanded to the granting of rights not only to minority Christian groups, but also to the rights of conscience for other minority religions as well. The rationale for this expansion of rights was expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the famous aphorism, “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” In other words, so long as minority groups do not interfere with the public’s pursuit of private goals, it does not matter what internal beliefs they hold. Thus, the rights of the minority to pursue their own perceived goods are protected to the extent that they refrain from interfering with the pursuit of happiness by the rest of the public. However, in those cases where a minority hold beliefs about the good that, if pursued, would interfere with the pursuit of the good by the majority, liberalism necessarily falls into a trap, in which either the rights of the majority or those of the minority must, unfortunately but of logical necessity, be sacrificed.

As Francis Fukuyama rightly noted, in the twentieth century, popular sovereignty came to be the theoretical basis for legitimacy in almost every nation on earth. Democracies and even dictatorships all claim their right to lead from the purported will of the people (if not the actual will). The only other model of government legitimacy in wide practice is that in which the leaders claim that their authority comes from God. Given this historical reality, it is unlikely that any liberal state can long endure without a liberal polity. The need for liberal polities in turn shows us the importance of crafting arguments for liberalism that can be embraced by the existing segments of the world today. By premising liberalism organically out from the values of existing traditions, it will be far easier to persuade non-liberal communities of the advantages of liberalism, and to maintain support for liberalism in existing liberal societies. Attempting to construct a monolithic, independent liberalism is tempting, but ultimately foolhardy, as it risks being rejected as competing comprehensive doctrine. As we can see, attempts to integrate liberalism into existing traditions have already succeeded in a variety of cultures around the world. Liberalism arose originally in the Protestant West following the Reformation, but has spread to numerous other cultures by showing its efficacy in preserving social goods favored in those cultures as well. The key is to recognize that each society necessarily has goods that it works to preserve, and liberalism should not cripple itself by disallowing public reference to those private goods, were it even possible to do so. If then the conclusion of the matter is that religious arguments cannot be excluded from the public realm, how is society to keep the religious majority from imposing its views on the minority? By convincing the polity using its own measures of the disaster that results from doing so. In the support of a liberal state, there is no substitute for having a liberal polity.

† Sadly, the page numbers referenced here are specific to a booklet composed by the professor of my “Law, Justice and the State” class and time constraints prevent me from cross-referencing them.

(:title "Frameworks for acceptable debate in a liberal society.":)

The key achievement of early political liberalism was ensuring religious toleration. This was done by divorcing clerical authority from the creation and legitimization of civil legislation. In the aftermath of Europe’s religious wars, philosophers such as Locke and Kant embarked on a project to show that such ideological regulation does not result merely in potentially destructive battles against “heretics,” but also that it is contrary to rational morality to attempt to impose a religious lifestyle on others. Perhaps reflecting the perceived success of these efforts, some contemporary moral and political philosophers have additionally sought to limit the acceptable grounds for debate within a liberal society to those that can be justified to the public as a whole, rather than merely to those members of public who subscribe to particular religious creeds or other comprehensive doctrines. In this way, it is hoped that the dissociation of clerical authority and civil authority could be extended from a mere formal separation into a complete absence of mutual influence.

At issue is whether it is necessary separate religious ideals from secular ones in public debate in order to prevent the religiously motivated from infringing on the rights of others. To this end, Robert Audi urges the employment of the twin principles of “secular rationale” and “secular motivation.” The former means that all propositions in a public debate should be argued on secular merits, and the latter means that those merits alone must be a sufficiently compelling motivation for the advocacy lent a particular policy, not the motivation provided by a covert religious agenda. John Rawls recommends that debate about constitutional principles be limited to “public reason,” that is ideas which are not the product of any “comprehensive doctrine,” religious or secular. Opposing them, Philip Quinn and others advocate that only the barest of restraints be placed on public debate. I shall consider each system in turn before advancing my thesis that for both theoretical and practical reasons, it is not only undesirable to exclude comprehensive doctrines from public debate, but it is ultimately impossible as well. Instead, there is no method to create and maintain a liberal polity other than cultivating a liberal populace, and having a liberal populace—that is to say, a populace that respects the rights and preferences of minority groups—is in turn dependent on articulating many arguments for liberalism in such a way that each has maximum appeal to its intended segment of the population.

While Audi’s principles may be useful in certain circumstances, it seems odd that his rules are focused exclusively on religion. If it is true that religious arguments should be excluded from public debate because they cannot be accepted all members of society, then certainly there are secular arguments that are similarly controversial, and thus must also be excluded. Audi’s requirement are not strict enough to ensure universal acceptability. A Randian might still object to the public promotion of utilitarianism, a utilitarian might object to the promotion of Kantian values, and so forth. Audi’s view is too narrowly focused on religious views as uniquely controversial though there are numerous comprehensive doctrines that, though secular, are not universally accepted.

Quinn outlines his case by noting objections to Audi and Rawls. Essentially, Quinn sees Audi and Rawls as proposing a voluntary censorship for those who have political views that cannot be justified in secular terms. For example, Rawls claims in a footnote that the abortion debate can be resolved as a constitutional matter by appealing to public reason. It is a simple matter of balancing the rights of a woman with the good of letting the fetus develop. Thus, concludes Rawls, abortion should not be prohibited. However, the view set forth by Rawls presupposes a comprehensive framework for interpreting the rights of a fetus. In a case such as this, there is no way to make an argument that does not invoke some comprehensive doctrine, since the rights of fetuses (or lack thereof) are not part of a commonly agreed upon framework for debate at this time. Continuing the example of abortion, were someone to oppose a constitutional guarantee of a right to abortion on purely religious grounds, Audi and Rawls would have her bow out of the debate until she can provide a nonreligious and noncomprehensive argument for such opposition. However, to ask a rational member of liberal society to refrain from participating in the dialogue of democracy, it seems that a strong justification is required. Moreover, this exclusion of religiously motivated speech seems even harder to rationalize in light of the eminent controversy of some secular arguments and the apparent universality of some religious doctrines. Quinn asserts there is no basis for excluding certain accepted arguments due to their religious nature while simultaneously allowing more controversial arguments due to their purportedly secular nature. Similarly, to restrict the debate to only universally accepted propositions is to void the debate, since reasonable people disagree about nearly everything. Public reason, argues Quinn, is too weak a foundation on which to build liberal society. Both Audi and Rawls craft exceptions to their exclusionary systems to improve their general acceptability, says Quinn, but it would be easier to abandon the systems all together. Certainly, historically in America, a semi-liberal democracy has held together in spite of whatever pressures have been put on it by those who have used religious language as a part of public discourse. If anything allowing more dialogue is helpful, as it encourages more comprehensive frameworks to incorporate liberal principles independently.

Moreover, it is not merely religiously held convictions that puzzle society. Some advocates see global warming as looming threat to earth’s habitability, while others dismiss the possibility. Some feel that genetically modified foods should be carefully regulated in order to protect the population. While certainly, a large majority of scientists have an opinion about such matters, this does not stop a persistent minority of population from questioning them. Nevertheless, liberal states act as though perfect consensus exists in these cases, when in fact, the consensus is actually only very strong.

Even beyond potentially ethereal questions of religious injunctions and scientific theories, some citizens question received history, such as the Holocaust. Still others see conspiracies surrounding Pearl Harbor, Kennedy’s assignation, and the September 11 attacks. If it is not fair to exclude these views from possibility of use in legislation, though they seem to be quite demonstrably false, then it seems unreasonable to disallow appeals to non-controversial religious propositions from the public forum while beliefs further removed from credulity are available for justificatory use. However, if such unsavory views are preemptively excised from possible use in the public square by fiat, then we run the risk of returning to the pre-Enlightenment age, in which the only way to change the orthodoxy of received thinking within a nation is through revolution. Clearly, this is absurd. The restriction of religious speech in support of a particular law or constitutional composition cannot be proposed on the grounds of its unique controversy, given the free pass allowed to other, potentially even more controversial, positions.

Even accepting that there are claims other than religious ones that are highly controversial, it can still be claimed that religious ideals and comprehensive doctrines should still be excluded because they are qualitatively different from other controversial ideas, in that other ideas can be tested empirically. However, if constitutional justifications relying on concepts that are outside the realm of Popperian falsification were removed from consideration, it would result in the paralysis of the state, because facts are only useful for the creation of policy in the degree to which they help us realize some goal, and goals are intrinsically non-empirical. Without some goal in mind, no quantity of facts, non-controversial or otherwise, can provide no guideline to legislation. Thus, at the minimum, some small number of non-publicly verifiable goals must be given exemption.

It may then be proposed that liberalism need only find and allow the use of those goals that are commonly held by all. Alternatively, it may be proposed that the bare minimum goals needed to establish a liberal state should be found. The first proposed set of exemptions is clearly nonviable, since we know both a priori and from experience that there are no goals held in common by absolutely all. Even goals as strongly and widely endorsed as life and happiness have some opponents. If there were already a common set of goals held by all, then would already be consensus about the nature of good life, and hence no need to implement the liberal compromise. Liberalism is the result of a lack of consensus about the nature of the good life, not a surplus.

The second proposed set of exemptions encounters the difficulty that having goals of one sort or another, no matter how limited in scope or seemingly universal, necessarily puts outer limits on the acceptable means of pursuing the good life. For example, by having the goal of allowing people to live without the fear of external violence, we necessarily prevent those who believe that the gods demand involuntary human sacrifice from pursuing their vision of the good life. Though liberal goals have a small scope, consisting in the main of allowing people to live together peaceably, these goals nevertheless necessarily prohibit the pursuit of goals that are contrary to them. Therefore, no matter how minimal the set of societal goals proposed, innumerable other goals will be precluded. Given that some goals must be preclude if others are pursued, then we must find some way of determining which set of goals are worth permitting. However, in doing so, we have necessarily created a meta-framework about the sort of goals allowable, thus violating our premise that comprehensive doctrines are by their qualitative nature unsuited for justification within a liberal constitution. From this failure we can see that it is quixotic in the extreme to try remove all comprehensive schemes from the justification of legislation for the simple reason that liberal aims are themselves comprehensive in their desire to allow the pursuit of a plurality of individually chosen goals.

Strong, Rawlsian liberalism may now seem self-negating. If the goal of liberal society is to allow pursuit of individually ascribed goals, yet liberalism itself necessarily curtails the freedom to pursue certain goals, the question remains: what precisely can liberalism do? The answer is that while liberalism cannot protect the rights of all groups including those postulated to be antagonistic to liberal principles, liberalism is able to preserve the rights of most actual minority groups within a liberal society, provided that they accept the fundamentals of liberalism as well. While it may first seem a bit disappointing that liberalism is only for liberals, on closer inspection, it seems impossible to imagine how liberalism could operate by any other means.

Still, a liberalism that makes life safe for liberals and those not antagonistic to liberalism is not to be undervalued. Recall that the impetus for forming liberalism in the first place was the desire to escape the internecine warfare of the early modern era. The compromise that slowly emerged was the non-interference of government in matters of conscience. At first, this was purely justified on Christian grounds that salvation was an individual matter, not a collective one, so it was counterproductive to enforce membership in particular sects of Protestantism. As time went on, this compromise expanded to the granting of rights not only to minority Christian groups, but to the rights of conscience for other minority religions as well. The rationale for this expansion of rights was expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the famous aphorism, “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” In other words, so long as minority groups do not interfere with the public’s pursuit of private goals, it does not matter what internal beliefs they hold. Thus, the rights of the minority to pursue their own perceived goods are protected to the extent that they refrain from interfering with the pursuit of happiness by the rest of the public. However, in those cases where a minority hold beliefs about the good that, if pursued, would interfere with the pursuit of the good by the majority, liberalism necessarily falls into a trap, in which either the rights of the majority or those of the minority must, unfortunately but of logical necessity, be sacrificed.

Perhaps, as a basic matter of fairness or a pragmatic desire to avoid engendering resentment, explicit protections of liberal society ought not be worked into the constitutional framework of a liberal state itself. Nevertheless, it still remains necessary for a liberal polity to be promoted by either passive or active means as demanded by the situation. Simultaneously, in order for a liberal polity to retain its status as liberal, the majority must heed the demands of actual, existing minority groups in order to keep from obstructing their pursuit of goals, where doing so does not jeopardize the continuation of the state as liberal. Thus, rather than specify in advance that the majority only advance those goals that can be advanced on secular rational merits alone as Audi’s principles demand, the liberal polity will be able to advance the general goals of the majority, so long as those goals do not substantially infringe on the rights of liberal minorities.

The necessity of an organically liberal polity

It may seem counterintuitive that liberal society must merely tolerate non-liberals and actively oppose anti-liberals, yet nevertheless it should refrain from enshrining liberal rationales as the only ones acceptable for legislative legitimacy for reasons both theoretical and practical. Theoretically, we have already seen that it is impossible to have legislative goals for a state that do not implicitly constitute some sort of comprehensive doctrine, no matter how haphazard. Practically, limiting approved speech is likely to be counterproductive, as by stifling the expression of non-liberal sentiments, it potentially converts those sentiments to anti-liberal ones, since even mild censorship feeds a sense of aggrieved martyrdom. The religious majority that sees itself turned away at the ballot box will almost inevitably respond by attempting to express its values through other means. In cases where the majority is imposing on an existing minority, constitutional limitations may hinder the majority, but no constitutional principle can long withstand the determined majority. The result is the dissolution of the liberality of the state in question. Instead, proponents of liberalism must dissuade the majority from actively irritating the minority by persuading them using the strongest means of rational persuasion available.

This line of persuasion will almost certainly come from the private reasoning of the group itself. As Rawls himself notes, “Surely, the most fundamental questions should be settled by appealing to the most important truths, yet these may far transcend public reason” (216). In spite of this statement, he claims that the diverse nature of society requires that justification be made without respect to any one comprehensive doctrine. However, there is another means to resolving the question of providing justifications to a diverse society. Society can justify itself to each comprehensive doctrine separately. Society is not prevented from doing so by a shortage of scholars willing to craft new arguments, and the result would be a stronger commitment to the ideals of liberal society by adherents of the various comprehensive doctrines. The key is to draw support from within the private reason of the group in order to bolster liberalism as a whole. Audi was doing something like this when he suggests from the “Hebraic-Christian tradition” that there is a moral obligation to refrain from endorsing legislation for religious reasons. The result of positively utilizing such activity is that the dream of a monolithic theory of liberalism is cast aside in favor of a thousand liberalisms, each with a justification particular to the group that supports it for their own private reasons. The scientist can be shown that liberalism allows his pursuit of knowledge, the clergyman can be shown that his religious tradition is not only compatible with liberalism but able to embrace it, and the insurance actuary can see that life expectancy in modern liberal states is higher.

The only limitations are that participants accept the fundamental political equality of all human beings so the non-infringing preferences of minority groups are preserved and that they are willing to debate among other groups rationally. These limitations must not come as preconditions, but as a result of the internal deliberation of each group in particular. Rawls, of course, sees the need for private reasoning to convince groups of the merits of a liberal state prior to its ordering, but he fails to see that this process cannot end with the settling of constitutional principles, but must continue perpetually, bringing forth new liberal commitments from within each comprehensive doctrine, as there is no viable means of imposing liberal commitments from without.

As Francis Fukuyama rightly noted, in the twentieth century, popular sovereignty came to be the theoretical basis for legitimacy in almost every nation on earth. Democracies and even dictatorships all claim their right to lead from the purported will of the people (if not the actual will). The only other model of government legitimacy in wide practice is that in which the leaders claim that their authority comes from God. Given this historical reality, it is unlikely that any liberal state can long endure without a liberal polity. The need for liberal polities in turn shows us the importance of crafting arguments for liberalism that can be embraced by the existing segments of the world today. By premising liberalism organically out from the values of existing traditions, it will be far easier to persuade non-liberal communities of the advantages of liberalism, and to maintain support for liberalism in existing liberal societies. Attempting to construct a monolithic, independent liberalism is tempting, but ultimately foolhardy, as it risks being rejected as competing comprehensive doctrine. As we can see, attempts to integrate liberalism into existing traditions have already succeeded in a variety of cultures around the world. Liberalism arose originally in the Protestant West following the Reformation, but has spread to numerous other cultures by showing its efficacy in preserving social goods favored in those cultures as well. The key is to recognize that each society necessarily has goods that works to preserve, and liberalism should not cripple itself by disallowing public reference to those private goods, were it even possible to do so. If then the conclusion of the matter is that religious arguments cannot be excluded from the public realm, how is society to keep the religious majority from imposing its views on the minority? By convincing the polity using its own measures of the disaster that results from doing so. In the support of a liberal state, there is no substitute for having a liberal polity.

Even accepting that there are claims other than religious ones that are highly controversial, it can still be claimed that religious ideals and comprehensive doctrines should still be excluded because they are qualitatively different from other controversial ideas, in that other ideas can be tested empirically. However, if constitutional justifications relying on concepts that are outside the realm of Popperian falsification were peremptorily removed from consideration, it would result in the paralysis of the state, because facts are only useful for the creation of policy in the degree to which they help us realize some goal, and goals are intrinsically non-empirical. Without some goal in mind, facts can provide no guideline to legislation. Thus, at the minimum, some small number of non-publically verifiable goals must be given exemption.

It may then be proposed that liberalism need only find and allow the use of those goals that are commonly held by all. Alternatively, it may be proposed that the bare minimum goals needed to establish a liberal state should be found. The first proposed set of exemptions is clearly nonviable, since we know both a priori and from experience that there are no goals held in common by absolutely all. Even goals as strongly and widely endorsed as life and happiness can find some opponent. If there were already a common set of goals held by all, then would already be consensus about the nature of good life, and hence no need to implement the liberal compromise. Liberalism is the result of a lack of consensus about the nature of the good life, not a surplus.

The second proposed set of exemptions encounters the difficulty that having goals of one sort or another, no matter how limited in scope or seemingly universal, necessarily puts outer limits on the acceptable means of pursuing the good life. For example, by having the goal of allowing people to live without the fear of external violence, we necessarily prevent those who believe that the gods demand involuntary human sacrifice from pursuing their vision of the good life. Though liberal goals have a small scope, consisting in the main of allowing people to live together peaceably, these goals nevertheless necessarily prohibit the pursuit of some other goals which are contrary to them. Therefore, no matter how minimal the set of societal goals proposed, innumerable other of goals will be precluded. Given that some goals must be preclude if others are pursued, then we must find some way of determining which set of goals are worth permitting. However, in doing so, we have necessarily created a meta-framework about the sort of goals allowable, thus violating our initial premise that comprehensive doctrines are of a qualitative nature unsuited for justification within a liberal constitution. From this failure we can see that it is quixotic in the extreme to try remove all comprehensive schemes from the justification of legislation for the simple reason that liberal aims are themselves comprehensive in their desire to allow the pursuit of a plurality of individually chosen goals.

Even accepting that there are claims other than religious ones that are highly controversial, it can still be claimed that religious ideals and comprehensive doctrines should still be excluded because they are qualitatively different from ideas which can be tested empirically. However, an injunction be put into place on legislative justification relying on concepts that are outside the realm of Popperian verification, it would result in the paralysis of the state, because facts are only useful for the creation of policy in the degree to which they help us realize some goal and goals are intrinsically non-empirical. Thus, at the minimum, some small number of non-publically verifiable goals must be given exemption.

It may then be proposed that liberalism need only find and allow the use of those goals that are commonly held by all or alternatively the bare minimum goals needed to establish a liberal state. The first proposed set of exemptions is clearly nonviable, since we know a priori and from experience that there are no goals held in common by absolutely all. The second proposed set of exemptions encounters the difficulty that having goals of one sort or another, no matter how limited in scope or seemingly universal, necessarily puts outer limits on the acceptable means of pursuing the good life. For example, by having the goal of allowing people to live without the fear of external violence, we necessarily prevent those who believe that the gods demand involuntary human sacrifice from pursuing their vision of the good life. Though liberal goals have a small scope, consisting in the main of allowing people to live together peaceably, these goals nevertheless necessarily prohibit the pursuit of some other goals which are contrary to them. Therefore, no matter how minimal the set of societal goals proposed, innumerable other of goals will be precluded.

From this failure we can see that it is quixotic in the extreme to try remove all comprehensive schemes from the justification of legislation for the simple reason that liberal aims are themselves comprehensive in their desire to allow the pursuit of a plurality of individually chosen goals. If liberalism limits the majority to only acting legislation for ends that can be assented to by all, then it enacts no legislation, for there are no ends that must assented to by all potential citizens a priori. Even goals as strongly and widely endorsed as life and happiness can find some opponent, in theory at least. If there were already a common set of goals held by all, then would already be consensus about the nature of good life, and hence no need to implement the liberal compromise. Liberalism is the result of a lack of consensus about the nature of the good life, not a surplus. However, with no goal to implement, there are no laws that can be endorsed, because laws are only enacted as a means to achieve some end. Thus, restricting legislative debate to only those proposals that might gain universal endorsement would inhibit the creation of legislation whatsoever.

This line of persuasion will almost certainly come from the private reasoning of the group itself. As Rawls himself notes, “Surely, the most fundamental questions should be settled by appealing to the most important truths, yet these may far transcend public reason” (216). In spite of this, he claims that the diverse nature of society requires that justification be made without respect to any one comprehensive doctrine. However, there is another means to resolving the question of providing justifications to a diverse society. Society can justify itself to each comprehensive doctrine separately. Society is not prevented from doing so by a shortage of scholars willing to craft new arguments, and the result would be a stronger commitment to the ideals of liberal society by adherents of the various comprehensive doctrines. The key is to draw support from within the private reason of the group in order to bolster liberalism as a whole. Audi is doing just this when he suggests from the “Hebraic-Christian tradition” that there is a moral obligation to refrain from endorsing legislation for religious reasons. The result of positively utilizing such activity is that the dream of a monolithic theory of liberalism is cast aside in favor of a thousand liberalisms, each with a justification particular to the group that supports it for their own private reasons. The scientist can be shown that liberalism allows his pursuit of knowledge, the clergyman can be shown that his religious tradition is not only compatible with liberalism but able to embrace it, and the insurance actuary can see that life expectancy in modern liberal states is higher.

Perhaps the key achievement of early political liberalism was ensuring religious toleration. This was done by divorcing clerical authority from the creation and legitimization of civil legislation. In the aftermath of Europe’s religious wars, philosophers such as Locke and Kant embarked on project to show that such ideological regulation does not result merely in potentially destructive battles against “heretics,” but also that it is contrary to rational morality to attempt to impose a religious lifestyle on others. Perhaps reflecting the perceived success of these efforts, some contemporary moral and political philosophers have additionally sought to limit the acceptable terms of debate within a liberal society to those that can be justified to the public as a whole, rather than merely to those members of public who subscribe to particular religious creeds or other comprehensive doctrines. In this way, it is hoped that the dissociation of clerical authority and civil authority could be extended from a mere formal separation into a complete absence of mutual influence.

At issue is whether it is necessary separate religious ideals from secular ones in public debate in order to prevent the religiously motivated from infringing on the rights of others. To this end, Robert Audi urges the employment of the twin principles of “secular rationale” and “secular motivation.” The former means that all propositions in a public debate should be argued on secular merits, and the latter means that those merits must be a sufficiently compelling motivation for the advocacy lent a particular policy, not a covert religious agenda. John Rawls recommends that debate about constitutional principles be limited to “public reason,” that is ideas which are not the product of any comprehensive doctrine, religious or secular. Opposing them, Philip Quinn and others advocate that only the barest of restraints be placed on public debate. I shall consider each system in turn before advancing my thesis that for both theoretical and practical reasons, it is not only undesirable to exclude “comprehensive doctrines” from public debate, but it is ultimately impossible as well. Instead, there is no method to create and maintain a liberal polity other than cultivating a liberal populace, and having a liberal populace—that is to say, a populace that respects the rights and preferences of minority groups—is in turn dependent on articulating many arguments for liberalism in such a way that each has maximum appeal to a particular segment of the population.

Accordingly, Rawls treats a wider variety of disfavored speech. He claims the exclusive use of “public reason” ensures that laws are justified in such a way that any rational citizens could accept them, in principle at least. When deciding “constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice,” Rawls maintains that a virtuous citizen would limit the discourse to public reason to ensure universal acceptability. Rawls defines nonpublic reasons as values endorsed only within individuals groups, such as “churches and universities, scientific societies and professional groups,” or whatever else (220). Within these different segments of society, different means and measures are used to resolve questions, so while a scientist might answer the question, “What do we know about human life?” by doing experiments, the clergyman would answer from religious tradition, and the insurance actuary by consulting tables of statistics and policy rates. Each of these methods may be valid within its domain, but in the larger public sphere, a different means of debate is needed. Furthermore, Rawls states that public reason must not rely on the acceptance of any comprehensive doctrine. The language of public reason instead should refer to our shared rights, the principles of reasoning, general beliefs, common sense, and other propositions justifiable to someone in the Rawlsian “original position.”

From the fabric of these means of common reasoning, it may in some cases be easy to make principles to which all can agree. However, in those cases where disagreements persist even having referenced public reason, Rawls states that it is up to each citizen to vote according to his or her understanding of the implications of public reason. Rawls also suggests some limitations on the strict application of public reason. In the case of a less ordered society, it may be necessary to advance the rights of all citizens and ideals of public reason by appealing to popularly held comprehensive doctrines, just as abolition was advanced by appeals to Christian morality in the nineteenth century.

Quinn outlines his case by noting objections to Audi and Rawls. Essentially, Quinn sees Audi and Rawls as proposing a voluntary censorship for those who have political views that cannot be justified in secular terms. For example, Rawls claims in a footnote that the abortion debate can be resolved as a constitutional matter by appealing to public reason. It is a simple matter of balancing the rights of a woman with the good of letting the fetus develop. Thus, concludes Rawls, abortion should not be prohibited. However, the view set forth by Rawls presupposes a comprehensive framework for interpreting the rights of a fetus. In a case such as this, there is no way to make an argument that does not invoke some comprehensive doctrine, since the rights of fetuses (or lack thereof) are not part of a commonly agreed upon framework for debate at this time. Continuing the example of abortion, were someone to oppose a constitutional guarantee of a right to abortion on purely religious grounds, Audi and Rawls would have her bow out of the debate until she can provide a nonreligious and noncomprehensive argument for such opposition. However, to ask a rational member of liberal society to refrain from participating in the dialogue of democracy, it seems that a strong justification is required. Moreover, this exclusion of religiously motivated speech seems even harder to rationalize in light of the eminent controversy of some secular arguments and the apparent universality of some religious doctrines. Quinn asserts there is no basis for excluding certain accepted arguments due to their religious nature while simultaneously allowing more controversial arguments due to their purportedly secular nature. However, to restrict the debate to only universally accepted propositions is to void the debate, since reasonable people disagree about nearly everything. Public reason, argues Quinn, is too weak a foundation on which to build liberal society. Both Audi and Rawls craft exceptions to their exclusionary systems to improve their general acceptability, says Quinn, but it would be easier to abandon the systems all together. Certainly, historically in America, a semi-liberal democracy has held together in spite of whatever pressures have been put on it by those who have used religious language as a part of public discourse. If anything allowing more dialogue is helpful, as it encourages more comprehensive frameworks to incorporate liberal principles independently.

Liberal goals are themselves comprehensive

Even ignoring the galaxy of controversial facts, there remains the impossibility of finding use for any raw fact without a system of goals to give it meaning. Facts are only useful for the creation of policy in the degree to which they help us realize some goal. However, having goals of one sort or another, no matter how limited in scope or seemingly universal, necessarily puts outer limits on the acceptable means of pursuing the good life. For example, by having the goal of allowing people to live without the fear of external violence, we necessarily prevent those who believe that the gods demand involuntary human sacrifice from pursuing their vision of the good life. Though liberal goals have a small scope, consisting in the main of allowing people to live together peaceably, these goals nevertheless necessarily prohibit the pursuit of some other goals which are contrary to them. Therefore, it is quixotic in the extreme to try remove all comprehensive schemes from the justification of legislation for the simple reason that liberal aims are themselves comprehensive in their desire to allow the pursuit of a plurality of individually chosen goals. If liberalism limits the majority to only acting legislation for ends that can be assented to by all, then it enacts no legislation, for there are no ends that must assented to by all potential citizens a priori. Even goals as strongly and widely endorsed as life and happiness can find some opponent, in theory at least. If there were already a common set of goals held by all, then would already be consensus about the nature of good life, and hence no need to implement the liberal compromise. Liberalism is the result of a lack of consensus about the nature of the good life, not a surplus. However, with no goal to implement, there are no laws that can be endorsed, because laws are only enacted as a means to achieve some end. Thus, restricting legislative debate to only those proposals that might gain universal endorsement would inhibit the creation of legislation whatsoever.

Strong, Rawlsian liberalism may now seem self-negating. If the goal of liberal society is to allow pursuit of individual ascribed goals, yet liberalism itself necessarily curtails the freedom to pursue certain goals, the question remains: what precisely can liberalism do? The answer is that while liberalism cannot protect the rights of groups postulated to be antagonistic to liberal principles, liberalism is able to preserve the rights of most actual minority groups within a liberal society, provided that they accept the fundamentals of liberalism as well. While it may first seem a bit disappointing that liberalism is only for liberals, on closer inspection, it seems impossible to imagine how liberalism operate by any other means.

Still, a liberalism that makes life safe for liberals and those not antagonistic to liberalism is not to be undervalued. Recall that the impetus for forming liberalism in the first place was the desire to escape the internecine warfare of the early modern era. The compromise that slowly emerged was the non-interference of government in matters of conscience. At first, this was purely justified on Christian grounds that salvation was an individual matter, not a collective one, so it was counterproductive to enforce membership in particular sects of Protestantism. As time went on, this compromise expanded to the granting of rights not only to minority Christian groups, but to the rights of conscience for other minority religions as well. This sentiment was expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the famous aphorism, “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” In other words, so long as minority groups do not interfere with the public’s pursuit of private goals, it does not matter what internal beliefs they hold. Thus, the rights of the minority to pursue their own perceived goods are protected to the extent that they refrain from interfering with the pursuit of happiness by the rest of the public. However, in those cases where a minority hold beliefs about the good that, if pursued, would interfere with the pursuit of the good by the majority, liberalism necessarily falls into a trap, in which either the rights of the majority or those of the minority must, unfortunately but of logical necessity, be sacrificed.

For this reason, there can be no single formula that ensures the preservation of minority preferences in all cases. Minority preferences cannot be respected in all theoretical circumstances, because it is possible for minority groups to be violently anti-liberal. Should such groups be given free reign, they would necessarily bring about the dismantling of liberal society by our definition of the groups as anti-liberal. This naturally leads to a dilemma about which preferences to respect for which minorities, a dilemma that cannot be resolved a priori. Fortunately, in the empirical world, we are not troubled by theoretical anti-liberal groups, but rather actual groups of indeterminate composition. Such groups may be liberal, non-liberal, or anti-liberal depending on chance and circumstance. Given this fact, it is therefore incumbent upon liberal society to at minimum persuade anti-liberal groups to become merely non-liberal, and preferably to demonstrate to all non-liberal groups the advantages of accepting liberalism. In other words, the only insurance for the continued existence of a liberal state is the promotion of a liberal polity.

Perhaps, as a basic matter of fairness or a pragmatic desire to avoid engendering resentment, protections of liberal society ought not be worked into the constitutional framework of a liberal state itself. Nevertheless, it still remains necessary for a liberal polity to be promoted by either passive or active means as demanded by the situation. Simultaneously, in order for a liberal polity to retain its status as liberal, the majority must heed the demands of actual, existing minority groups in order to keep from obstructing their pursuit of goals, where doing so does not jeopardize the continuation of the state as liberal. Thus, rather than specify in advance that the majority only advance those goals that can be advanced on rational merits alone as Audi’s principles demand, the liberal polity will advance the goals of the majority, so long as those goals do not substantially infringe on the rights of liberal minorities.

It may seem counterintuitive that liberal society must be merely tolerate non-liberals and actively oppose anti-liberals, yet nevertheless it should refrain from enshrining liberal rationales as the only ones acceptable for legislative legitimacy. From a practical perspective, limiting approved speech is likely to be counterproductive, as by stifling the expression of non-liberal sentiments, it potentially converts those sentiments to anti-liberal ones, since even mild censorship feeds a sense of aggrieved martyrdom. The religious majority that sees itself turned away at the ballot box will almost inevitably respond by attempting to express its values through other means. In cases where the majority is imposing on an existing minority, constitutional limitations may hinder the majority, but no constitutional principle can long withstand the determined majority. The result is the dissolution of the liberality of the state in question. Instead, proponents of liberalism must dissuade the majority from actively irritating the minority by persuading them using the strongest means of rational persuasion available.

This line of persuasion will almost certainly come from the private reasoning of the group itself. As Rawls himself notes, “Surely, the most fundamental questions should be settled by appealing to the most important truths, yet these may far transcend public reason” (216). In spite of this, he claims that the diverse nature of society requires that justification be made without respect to any one comprehensive doctrine. However, there is another means to resolving the question of providing justifications to a diverse society. Society can justify itself to each comprehensive doctrine separately. Society is not prevented from doing so by a shortage of scholars willing to craft new arguments, and the result would be a stronger commitment to the ideals of liberal society by adherents of the various comprehensive doctrines. The key is to draw support from within the private reason of the group in order to bolster liberalism as a whole. The result of this activity is that the dream of a monolithic theory of liberalism is cast aside in favor of a thousand liberalisms, each with a justification particular to the group that supports it for their own private reasons. The scientist can be shown that liberalism allows his pursuit of knowledge, the clergyman can be shown that his religious tradition is not only compatible with liberalism but able to embrace it, and the insurance actuary can see that life expectancy in modern liberal states is higher.

As the search for a monolithic liberal theory is abandoned, it natural to review what is lost in abandoning it. The goal of monolithic liberalism is to make a state that through the logical clarity of its composition must be accepted by all rational parties. It is hoped that by using the right formulation of veils of ignorance and states of nature, that one could rationally force all rational parties to assent to the basic justice and decency of a liberal state so-conceived. Put thusly, it should be readily apparent how clearly the quest for a monolithic liberalism was itself the expression of a comprehensive doctrine: the comprehensive doctrine of permitting the flourishing of all comprehensive doctrines. However, since some comprehensive doctrines preclude other comprehensive doctrines, the flourishing of all is not logically possible. Fortunately, we have an alternative in allowing the flourishing of doctrines which themselves are organically disposed to allow the flourishing of other means of pursuing the good life.

Perhaps the key achievement of early political liberalism was ensuring religious toleration. This was done by divorcing clerical authority from the creation and legitimization of civil legislation. In the aftermath of Europe’s religious wars, philosophers such as Locke and Kant embarked on project to show that such ideological regulation does not result merely in potentially destructive battles against “heretics,” but also that it is contrary to rational morality to attempt to impose a religious lifestyle on others. Perhaps reflecting the perceived success of these efforts, some contemporary moral and political philosophers have additionally sought to limit the acceptable terms of debate within a liberal society to those that can be justified to the public as a whole, and not merely to those members of public who subscribe to particular religious creeds or other comprehensive doctrines. In this way, it is hoped that the dissociation of clerical authority and civil authority can be fully extended from a mere formal separation into a complete absence of mutual influence.

At issue is whether it is necessary separate religious ideals from secular ones in public debate in order to prevent the religiously motivated from infringing on the rights of others. To this end, Robert Audi urges the employment of the twin principles of secular rationale and secular motivation, the former meaning all propositions in a public debate should be argued on secular merits and latter meaning that those merits must be a sufficiently compelling motivation for the advocacy lent a particular policy, not a covert religious agenda. John Rawls recommends that debate about constitutional principles be limited to “public reason,” that is ideas which are not the product of any comprehensive doctrine, religious or secular. Opposing him, Philip Quinn and others advocate that only the barest of restraints be placed on public debate. I shall consider each system in turn before advancing my thesis that for both theoretical and practical reasons, it is not only undesirable to exclude “comprehensive doctrines” from public debate, but it is ultimately impossible as well. Instead, there is no method to create and maintain a liberal polity other than cultivating a liberal populace, and having a liberal populace—that is to say, a populace that respects the rights and preferences of minority groups—is in turn dependent on articulating many arguments for liberalism in such a way that each has maximum appeal to a particular segment of the population.

Accordingly, Rawls treats a wider variety of disfavored speech. He claims the exclusive use of “public reason” ensures that laws are justified in such a way that any rational citizens could accept it, in principle at least. When deciding “constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice,” Rawls maintains that a virtuous citizen would limit the discourse to public reason to ensure universal acceptability. Rawls defines nonpublic reason as the values endorsed only within individuals groups, be they “churches and universities, scientific societies and professional groups,” or whatever else (220). Within these different segments of society, different means and measures are used to resolve questions, so while a scientist might answer the question, “What do we know about human life?” by doing experiments, the clergyman would answer from his religious tradition, and the insurance actuary by consulting tables of statistics and policy rates. Each of these methods may be valid within its domain, but in the larger public sphere, a different means of debate is needed. Furthermore, Rawls states that public reason must not rely on the acceptance of any comprehensive doctrine. The language of public reason instead should refer to our shared rights, the principles of reasoning, general beliefs, common sense, and other propositions justifiable to someone in the Rawlsian “original position.”

From the fabric of these means of common reasoning, it may in some cases be easy to make principles to which all can agree. However, in those cases where disagreements persist even having referenced public reason, Rawls states that it is up to each citizen to vote according to his or her understanding of the implications of public reason. Rawls also suggests some limitations on the strict application of public reason. In the case of a less ordered society, it may be necessary to advance the rights of all citizens and ideals of public reason by appealing to popularly held comprehensive doctrines, as when abolition was advanced by appeals to Christian morality in the nineteenth century.

Quinn outlines his case by noting objections to Audi and Rawls. Essentially, Quinn sees Audi and Rawls as proposing a voluntary censorship for those who have political views that cannot be justified in secular terms. For example, Rawls claims in a footnote that the abortion debate can be resolved as a constitutional matter by appealing to public reason. It is a simple matter of balancing the rights of a woman with the good of letting the fetus develop. Thus, concludes Rawls, abortion should not be prohibited. However, the view set forth by Rawls presupposes a comprehensive framework for interpreting the rights of a fetus. In a case such as this, there is no way to make an argument that does not invoke some comprehensive doctrine, since the rights of fetuses (or lack thereof) are not part of a commonly agreed upon framework for debate at this time. Continuing the example of abortion, were someone to oppose a constitutional guarantee of a right to abortion on purely religious grounds, Audi and Rawls would have her bow out of the debate until she can provide a nonreligious and noncomprehensive argument for such opposition. However, to limit someone’s rights to free speech and rights to participate in the rational dialogue of democracy, it seems that a strong justification is required. Moreover, this exclusion of religiously motivated speech seems even harder to rationalize in light of the eminent controversy of some secular arguments and the comparative universality of some religious doctrines. Quinn asserts there is no basis for excluding certain accepted arguments due to their religious nature while simultaneously allowing more controversial arguments due to their purportedly secular nature. However, to restrict the debate to only universally accepted propositions is to void the debate, since reasonable people disagree about nearly everything. Public reason, argues Quinn, is too weak a foundation on which to build liberal society. Both Audi and Rawls craft exceptions to their exclusionary systems to improve their general acceptability, says Quinn, but it would be easier to abandon the systems all together. Certainly, historically in America, a semi-liberal democracy has held together in spite of whatever pressures have been put on it by those who have used religious language as a part of public discourse. If anything allowing more dialogue is helpful, as it encourages more comprehensive frameworks to incorporate liberal principles independently.

Even ignoring the galaxy of controversial facts, there remains the impossibility of finding use for any raw fact without a system of goals to give it meaning. Facts are only useful for the creation of policy in the degree to which they help us realize some goal. However, having goals of one sort or another, no matter how limited in scope or seemingly universal, necessarily puts outer limits on the acceptable means of pursuing the good life. For example, by having the goal of allowing people to live without the fear of external violence, we necessarily prevent those who believe that the gods demand involuntary human sacrifice from pursuing their vision of the good life. Though the scope of liberal goals is quite small, consisting in the main of allowing people to live together peaceably, it nevertheless necessarily prohibits the pursuit of some other goals which are contrary to it. Therefore, it is quixotic in the extreme to try remove all comprehensive schemes from the justification of legislation for the simple reason that liberal aims are themselves comprehensive in their desire to allow the pursuit of a plurality of individually chosen goals. If liberalism limits the majority to only acting legislation for ends that can be assented to by all, then it enacts no legislation, for there are no ends that must assented to by all potential citizens a priori. Even goals as strongly and widely endorsed as life and happiness can find some opponent, in theory at least. If there were already a common set of goals held by all, then would already be consensus about the nature of good life, and hence no need to implement the liberal compromise. Liberalism is the result of a lack of consensus about the nature of the good life, not a surplus. However, with no goal to implement, there are no laws that can be endorsed, because laws are only enacted as a means to achieve some end. Thus, restricting legislative debate to only those proposals that might gain universal endorsement would inhibit the creation of legislation whatsoever.

Strong, Rawlsian liberalism may now seem self-negating. If the goal of liberal society is to allow pursuit of individual ascribed goals, yet liberalism itself necessarily curtails the freedom to pursue certain goals, the question remains: what precisely can liberalism do? The answer is that while liberalism cannot protect the rights of groups postulated to be antagonistic to liberal principles, liberalism is able to preserve the rights of actual minority groups within a liberal society, provided that they accept the fundamentals of liberalism as well. While it may first seem a bit disappointing that liberalism is only for liberals, on closer inspection, it seems impossible to imagine how liberalism could be propagated by any other means.

A liberalism that makes life safe for liberals and those not antagonistic to liberalism is not to be undervalued, however. Recall that the impetus for forming liberalism in the first place was the desire to escape the internecine warfare of the early modern era. The compromise that slowly emerged was the non-interference of government in matters of conscience. At first, this was justified on purely the purely Christian grounds that salvation was an individual, not collective matter, so it was counterproductive to enforce membership in particular sects of Protestantism. As time went on, this compromise expanded to the granting of rights not only to minority Christian groups, but to the rights of conscience for other minority religions as well. This sentiment was expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the famous aphorism, “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” In other words, so long as minority groups do not interfere with the public’s pursuit of private goals, it does not matter what internal beliefs they hold. Thus, the rights of the minority to their own beliefs are protected to the extent that they refrain from interfering with the pursuit of happiness by the rest of the public. However, in those cases where a minority hold beliefs about the good that, if pursued, would interfere with the pursuit of the good by the majority, liberalism necessarily falls into a trap, in which either the rights of the majority or those of the minority must, unfortunately but of logical necessity, be sacrificed.

For this reason, there can be no single formula that assures the preservation the minority preferences in all cases. Minority preferences cannot be respected in all theoretical circumstances, because it is possible for minority groups to be violently anti-liberal. Should such groups be given free reign, they would necessarily institute the dismantling of liberal society by the very nature of our specification of the group as anti-liberal. This naturally leads to a dilemma about which preferences to respect for which minorities, and this dilemma cannot be resolved a priori. However, fortunately, in the empirical world, we are not troubled by theoretical anti-liberal groups, but actual groups of indeterminate composition. Such groups may be liberal, non-liberal, or anti-liberal as lead by chance and circumstances. Given this fact, it is therefore incumbent upon liberal society to at minimum, persuade anti-liberal groups to become merely non-liberal, and preferably to demonstrate to all non-liberal groups the advantages of accepting liberalism. In other words, the only way to ensure the continued existence of liberal states is through the promotion of liberal polities.

Perhaps, as a basic matter of fairness or a pragmatic desire to avoid engendering resentment, protections of liberal society ought not be worked into the constitutional framework of a liberal state itself. Nevertheless, it still remains necessary for a liberal polity to be promoted by either passive or active means as demanded by the situation. Simultaneously, in order for a liberal polity to retain its status as liberal, the majority must listen to the demands of actual, existing minority groups in order to keep from infringing on their preferences, where doing so does not jeopardize the continuation of the state as liberal. Thus, rather than specify in advance that the majority only advance those goals that can be advanced on rational merits alone as Audi’s principles demand, the liberal polity will advance the goals of the majority, so long as those goals do not substantially infringe on the rights of real minorities.

It may seem counterintuitive then that if liberal society must be merely tolerant of non-liberals and actively opposed to anti-liberals, that it should nevertheless refrain from enshrining liberal rationales as the only ones acceptable for legislative legitimacy. The practical reason for this freedom, above the impossibility of having liberal consensus without specified ends as mentioned before, is that limiting approved speech is likely to be counterproductive, as by stifling the expression of non-liberal energies, it potentially converts them to anti-liberal ones. The religious majority that sees itself turned away at the ballot box will almost inevitably respond by attempting to express its values through other means. In cases where the reasoning of the majority is otherwise uncontroversial to society, it creates needless strife by antagonizing their values. In cases where the majority is imposing on an existing (non-theoretical) minority, constitutional limitations may hinder the majority, but no constitutional principle can long withstand the determined majority. The result is the dissolution of the liberality of the state in question. Instead, proponents of liberalism must dissuade the majority from actively irritating the minority by persuading them using the strongest reasoning available.

(here is where to shout out Audi) This line of persuasion will almost certainly come from the private reasoning of the group itself. As Rawls himself notes, “Surely, the most fundamental questions should be settled by appealing to the most important truths, yet these may far transcend public reason” (216). He claims that the diverse nature of society ensures that society must be justified without respect to any one comprehensive doctrine. However, it seems that society could also function while justifying itself to each comprehensive doctrine separately. Society is not prevented from doing so by a shortage of scholars willing to craft new arguments, and the result would be a stronger commitment to the ideals of liberal society by adherents of the various comprehensive doctrines. The key is drawing support from within the private reason of the group in order to bolster liberalism as a whole. The result of this activity is that the dream of a monolithic theory of liberalism is cast aside in favor of a thousand liberalisms, each with a justification particular to group that supports it for their own private reasons.

Show the scientist that liberalism allows his pursuit of knowledge. Show the clergyman that his religious tradition is not only compatible with liberalism but able to embrace it. Show the insurance actuary that life expectancy in liberal states is higher.

The only limitation is that participants accept the fundamental political equality of all human beings such that the non-infringing preferences of minority groups are preserved and that they are willing to debate among other groups rationally. These limitations must not come as preconditions, but as a result of the internal deliberation of each group in particular. Rawls, of course, sees the need for private reasoning to convince groups of the merits of a liberal state prior to its ordering, but he fails to see that this process cannot end with the settling of constitutional principles, but must continue perpetually, bringing forth new liberal commitments from within each comprehensive doctrine, as there is no viable means of imposing liberal commitments from without.

As the search for a monolithic liberal theory is abandoned, it natural to review what is lost in abandoning it. The goal of monolithic liberalism is to make a state which by the logical clarity of its nature must be accepted by all rational parties. It is hoped that by using the right formulation of veils of ignorance and states of nature, that one could rationally force all parties to assent to the basic justice and decency of the liberal state so-conceived. Put thusly, it should be readily apparent how clearly the quest for a monolithic liberalism was itself the expression of a comprehensive doctrine: the comprehensive doctrine of permitting the flourishing of all comprehensive doctrines. However, since some comprehensive doctrines entail the foregoing of other comprehensive doctrines, the flourishing of all is not logically possible. Fortunately, we have an alternative in allowing the flourishing of doctrines which themselves are organically disposed to allow the flourishing of other means of pursuing the good life.

As Francis Fukuyama rightly noted, in the twentieth century, popular sovereignty came to be the theoretical basis for legitimacy in almost every nation on earth. Democracies and even dictatorships all claim their right to lead from the purported will of the people (if not the actual will). The only other model of government legitimacy in wide practice is that in which the leaders claim that their authority comes from God. Given this historical reality, it is unlikely that any liberal state could long endure without a liberal polity. The need for liberal polities in turn shows us the importance of crafting arguments for liberalism that can be embraced by the existing segments of the world today. By premising liberalism organically out from the values of existing traditions, it will be far easier to persuade non-liberal communities of the advantages of liberalism, and to maintain support for liberalism in existing liberal societies. Attempting to construct a monolithic, independent liberalism is tempting, but ultimately foolhardy, as it risks being rejected as competing comprehensive doctrine. As we can see, attempts to integrate liberalism into existing traditions have already succeeded in a variety of cultures around the world. Liberalism arose originally in the Protestant West following the Reformation, but has spread to numerous other cultures by showing its efficacy in preserving social goods favored in those cultures as well. The key is to recognize that each society necessarily has goods that works to preserve, and liberalism should not cripple itself by disallowing public reference to those privately goods, were it even possible to do so. If then the conclusion of the matter is that religious arguments cannot be excluded from the public realm, how is society to keep the religious majority from imposing its views on the minority? By convincing the polity using its own measures of the disaster that results from doing so. In the support of a liberal state, there is no substitute for having a liberal polity.

Perhaps the key achievement of early political liberalism was ensuring religious toleration. This was done by divorcing clerical authority from the creation and legitimizing of civil legislation. In the aftermath of Europe’s religious wars, philosophers such as Locke and Kant embarked on project to show that such ideological regulation results not merely in potentially destructive battles against “heretics,” but also that it is contrary to rational morality to attempt to impose a religious lifestyle on others. Perhaps reflecting the perceived success of these efforts, some contemporary moral and political philosophers have additionally sought to limit the acceptable terms of debate within a liberal society to those that can be justified to the public as a whole, and not merely to those who subscribe to particular religious creeds or other comprehensive doctrines. In this way, it is hoped that the dissociation of clerical authority and civil authority can be fully extended from a mere formal separation into a complete absence of mutual influence.

At issue is whether it is necessary separate religious ideals from secular ones in public debate in order to prevent the religiously motivated from infringing on the rights of others. To this end, Robert Audi urges the employment of twin principles of secular rational and secular motivation, the latter meaning all propositions in a public debate should be argued on secular merits and former meaning that those merits must be a sufficiently compelling motivation for the advocacy lent a particular policy, not a covert religious agenda. John Rawls recommends that debate about constitutional principles be limited to “public reason,” that is ideas which are not the product of any comprehensive doctrine, religious or secular. Opposing him, Philip Quinn and others advocate that only the barest of restraints be placed on public debate. I shall consider each system in turn before advancing my thesis that for both theoretical and practical reasons, it is not only undesirable to exclude “comprehensive” doctrines from public debate, but it is ultimately impossible as well. Instead, there is no method to create and maintain a liberal polity other than cultivating a liberal populace, and having a liberal populace, that is to say, a populace that respects the rights of minority groups, is in turn dependent on articulating many arguments for liberalism in such a way that each has maximum appeal to a particular segment of the population.

Audi begins by reviewing the animating principles of liberal democracy. He names those principles that govern the relation of the state to religion as the libertarian principle, the equalitarian principle, and the neutrality principle (39)†. The libertarian principle is that the state must allow citizens to persist in any religious belief or engage in any religious practice so long as they do not infringe on the rights of others. The equalitarian principle maintains that the state must not promote any one religion over another. The neutrality principle holds that “the state should neither favor nor disfavor religion” (39). Next, Audi argues that liberal interests are best served by ensuring that laws are justified on non-religious grounds. Essentially, he argues that in the “Hebraic-Christian tradition,” believers are obligated to find a “theo-ethical equilibrium” between obligations to their personal understanding of morality and their conduct in society. The key to reaching this equilibrium is, in Audi’s view, to observe the principle of secular rationale and the principle of secular motivation. As previously stated the principle of secular rationale asserts the necessity of grounding any proposed law in secular language, so that all citizens may equally consider its merits. The principle of secular motivation expands on this idea by requiring that the secular justification given for a policy proposal be sufficient to motivate the promotion that it is given. In other words, one should not promote a law unless it is for a reason that is honestly secular and not a pretext covering some deeper religious motivation.

While Audi’s principles may be useful in certain circumstances, it seems odd that his rules are focused exclusively on religion. If it is true that religious arguments should be excluded from public debate because they cannot be accepted all members of society, then certainly there are secular arguments that are similarly controversial, and thus must also be excluded. Audi’s requirement are not strict enough to ensure universal acceptability. A Randian might still object to the public promotion of utilitarianism, a utilitarian might object to the promotion of Kantian values, and so forth. Audi’s view is too narrowly focused on religious views as uniquely controversial.

Accordingly, Rawls treats a wider variety of disfavored speech. He claims the exclusive use of “public reason” ensures that laws are justified in such a way that any rational citizens could accept it, in principle at least. When deciding “constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice,” Rawls maintains that a virtuous citizen would limit the discourse to public reason to ensure universal acceptability. Rawls defines nonpublic reason as the values endorsed only within individuals groups, be they “churches and universities, scientific societies and professional groups,” or whatever else (220). Within these different segments of societies, different means and measures are used to resolve questions, so while a scientist might answer the question, “What do we know about human life?” by doing experiments, the clergyman would answer by consulting scriptures, and the insurance actuary by consulting tables of statistics and policy rates. Each of these methods may be valid within its domain, but in the larger public sphere, a different means of debate is needed. Furthermore, Rawls states that public reason must not rely on the acceptance of any comprehensive doctrine. The language of public reason instead should refer to our shared rights, the principles of reasoning, general beliefs, common sense, and other propositions justifiable to someone in his “original position.”

From the fabric of these means of common reasoning, it may in some cases be easy to make principles to which all can agree. However, in those cases where disagreements persist even having referenced public reason, Rawls states that it is up to each citizen to vote according to his or her understanding of the implications of public reason. Rawls also suggests some limitations on the strict application of public reason. In the case of a less ordered society, it may be necessary to advance the rights of all citizens and ideals of public reason by appealing to popularly held comprehensive doctrines, as when the cause of anti-slavery was advanced by Christians in the nineteenth century.

Quinn outlines his case by noting objections to Audi and Rawls. Essentially, Quinn sees Audi and Rawls as proposing a voluntary censorship for those who have political views that cannot be justified in secular terms. For example, Rawls claims in a footnote that the abortion debate can be resolved as a constitutional matter appealing to public reason. It is a simple matter of balancing the rights of a woman with the good of letting the fetus develop. Thus, concludes Rawls, abortion should not be prohibited. However, the view set forth by Rawls presupposes a comprehensive framework for interpreting the rights of a fetus. In a case such as this, there is no way to make an argument that does not invoke some comprehensive doctrine, since the rights of fetuses (or lack thereof) are not part of a commonly agreed upon framework for debate. Continuing the example of abortion, were someone to oppose a constitutional guarantee of a right to abortion on purely religious grounds, Audi and Rawls would have her bow out of the debate until she can provide a nonreligious and noncomprehensive argument for such opposition. However, to limit someone’s rights to free speech and rights to participate in the rational dialogue of democracy, it seems that a strong justification is required. Moreover, this exclusion of religiously motivated speech seems even harder to rationalize in light of the eminent controversy of some secular arguments and the comparative universality of some religious doctrines. Quinn asserts there is no basis for excluding certain accepted arguments due to their religious nature while simultaneously allowing more controversial arguments due to their purportedly secular nature. However, to restrict the debate to only universally accepted propositions is to void the debate, since reasonable people disagree about nearly everything. Public reason, argues Quinn, is too weak a foundation on which to build liberal society. Both Audi and Rawls craft exceptions to their exclusionary systems to improve their general acceptability, says Quinn, but it would be easier to abandon the systems all together. Certainly, historically in America, a semi-liberal democracy has held together in spite of whatever pressures have been put on it by those who have used religious language as a part of public discourse. If anything allowing more dialogue is helpful, as it encourages more comprehensive frameworks to incorporate liberal principles independently.

Furthering Quinn’s objections to those who would limit debate, it is worth observing the many ways in which religious and secular matters ultimately are inseparably overlapping. Christian Science claims that modern, secular medicine is essentially a sham. Yet, most liberal states aim to deliver scientifically orthodox healthcare to some or all of their citizens. Islamic extremists insist that Allah’s will is to restore the caliphate and abolish pluralist democracy, yet liberal states continue to insist on their right to be. Jainists claim that any almost action undertaken by a human being is a sin, since most actions increase the suffering in the world by harming plants and animals. Yet liberal states seek economic expansion rather than ataraxia. Moreover, not only do liberal states passively ignore the claims of various religious believers, they actively rebut them. Publicly funded scientists claim that Genesis cannot be considered to have a basis in literal truth. The United States government forced the Japanese emperor to admit his non-divinity. The children of Christian Scientists are forced to take vaccines. These examples are not merely exceptions to the general pattern of religious and secular distinguishability but indicative of the intertwined nature of the two. The majority of religions make claims about the nature of material world as well as the spiritual one, which necessarily leads to conflicts of authority with secular institutions. The religious and secular cannot be disentangled as neatly as one would like to hope.

Moreover, it is not merely religiously held convictions that puzzle society. Some advocates see global warming as looming threat to earth’s habitability, while others dismiss the possibility. Some feel that genetically modified foods should be carefully regulated in order to protect the population Certainly, a large majority of scientists have an opinion about such matters, but this does not stop a persistent minority of population from questioning them. Nevertheless, liberal states act as though perfect consensus exists in these cases, when in fact, the consensus is actually only very strong.

Even beyond potentially ethereal questions of religious injunctions and scientific theories, some citizens question received history such as the Holocaust. Still others see conspiracies surrounding Pearl Harbor, Kennedy’s assignation, and the September 11 attacks. If it is not fair to exclude these views from possibility of use in legislation, though they seem to be quite demonstrably false, then it seems unreasonable to disallow appeals to non-controversial religious propositions from the public forum while beliefs further removed from credulity are available for justificatory use. However, if such unsavory views are preemptively excised from possible use in the public square by fiat, then we run the risk of returning to the pre-Enlightenment age, in which the only way to change the orthodoxy of received thinking within a nation is through revolution. Clearly, this is absurd. The restriction of religious speech in support of a particular law or constitutional composition cannot be proposed on the grounds of its unique controversy, given the free pass allowed to other, potentially even more controversial, positions.

Liberalism may now seem self-negating. If the goal of liberal society is to allow pursuit of individual ascribed goals, yet liberalism itself necessarily curtails the freedom to pursue certain goals, the question remains: what precisely can liberalism do? The answer is that while liberalism cannot protect the rights of groups postulated to be antagonistic to liberal principles, liberalism is able to preserve the rights of actual minority groups within a liberal society, provided that they accept the fundamentals of liberalism as well. While it may first seem a bit disappointing that liberalism is only for liberals, on closer inspection, it seems impossible to imagine how liberalism could be propagated by any other means.

A liberalism that makes life safe for liberals, or at least those not antagonistic to liberalism, is not to be undervalued, however. Recall that the impetus for forming liberalism in the first place was the desire to escape the internecine warfare of the early modern era. The compromise that slowly emerged was the non-interference of government in matters of conscience. At first, this was justified on purely the purely Christian grounds that salvation was an individual, not collective matter, so it was counterproductive to enforce membership in particular sects of Protestantism. As time went on, this compromise expanded to the granting of rights not only to minority Christian groups, but to the rights of conscience for other minority religions as well. This sentiment was expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the famous aphorism, “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” In other words, so long as minority groups do not interfere with your pursuit of private goods, it does not matter what internal beliefs they hold. Thus, the rights of the minority to their own beliefs are protected to the extent that they refrain from interfering with the public pursuit of the good. However, in those cases where the minority hold beliefs about the good that, if pursued, would interfere with the pursuit of the good by the majority, liberalism necessarily falls into a trap, in which either the rights of the majority or those of the minority must unfortunately but necessarily be sacrificed. (shout out to what’s his face)

For this reason, there can be no single formula that assures the preservation the minority preferences in all cases. Minority preferences cannot be respected in all theoretical circumstances, because it is possible for minority groups to be violently anti-liberal. Should such groups be given free reign, they would necessarily institute the dismantling of liberal society by the very nature of our specification of the group as anti-liberal. This naturally leads to a dilemma about which preferences to respect for which minorities, and this dilemma cannot be resolved a priori. However, fortunately, in the empirical world, we are not troubled by theoretical anti-liberal groups, but actual groups of indeterminate composition. Such groups may be liberal, non-liberal, or anti-liberal as lead by chance and circumstances. Given this fact, it is therefore incumbent upon liberal society to at minimum, persuade anti-liberal groups to become merely non-liberal, and preferably to demonstrate to all non-liberal groups the advantages of accepting liberalism. In other words, the only ensure the continued existence of liberal states is through the promotion of liberal polities. Perhaps, as a basic matter of fairness or a pragmatic desire to avoid engendering resentment, protections of liberal society ought not be worked into the constitutional framework of a liberal state itself. Nevertheless, it still remains necessary for a liberal polity to be promoted by either passive or active means as demanded by the situation. Simultaneously, in order for a liberal polity to retain its status as liberal, the majority must listen to the demands of actual, existing minority groups in order to keep from infringing on their rights, where doing so does not jeopardize the continuation of the state as liberal. Thus, rather than specify in advance that the majority only advance those goals that can be advanced on rational merits alone as Audi’s principles demand, the liberal polity will advance the goals of the majority, so long as those goals do not substantially infringe on the rights of real minorities.

Quinn outlines his case by noting objections to Audi and Rawls. Essentially, Quinn sees Audi and Rawls as proposing a voluntary censorship for those who have political views that cannot be justified in secular terms. Before examining his view, let us examine to an example of the use of public reason. Rawls claims in a footnote that the abortion debate can be resolved as a constitutional matter appealing to public reason. It is a simple matter of balancing the rights of a woman with the good of letting the fetus develop. Thus, concludes Rawls, abortion should not be prohibited. However, the view set forth by Rawls relies on a comprehensive framework for interpreting the rights of a fetus. In a case such as this, there is no way to make an argument that does not run aground on the rocks of comprehensive doctrine. Continuing the example of abortion, were someone to oppose constitutional enshrinement of a right to abortion on purely religious grounds, Audi and Rawls would have her bow out of the debate until she can provide non-religious and non-comprehensive reasoning for such opposition. However, to limit someone’s rights to free speech and rights to participate in the rational dialogue of democracy, it seems that a strong justification is required. Moreover, this exclusion of religiously motivated speech seems even harder to rationalize in light of the eminent controversy of some secular arguments and the comparative universality of some religious doctrines. Quinn asserts there is no basis for excluding certain accepted arguments due to their religious nature while simultaneously allowing more controversial arguments due to their purportedly secular nature. However, to restrict the debate to only universally accepted propositions is to invite anarchy, since reasonable people can and do disagree about nearly every line of argument. Public reason, argues Quinn, is decidedly weak, and any attempt to build a foundation for liberal society on it is bound to crack under the weight. Both Audi and Rawls craft exceptions to their exclusionary systems to improve their general acceptability, says Quinn, but it would be easier to abandon the systems all together. Certainly, historically in America, a semi-liberal democracy has held together in spite of whatever pressures have been put on it by those who have used religious language as a part of public discourse. If anything allowing more dialogue is helpful, as it encourages more comprehensive frameworks to incorporate liberal principles independently, even as liberalism persists without recourse to any single justification.

Even beyond potentially ethereal questions of religious injunctions and scientific theories, some citizens question received historical facts such as the Holocaust, though it was observed by millions of witnesses. Still others see conspiracies surrounding Pearl Harbor, Kennedy’s assignation, and the September 11 attacks. If it is not fair to exclude these views from possibility of use in legislation, though they seem to be quite demonstrably false, then it seems unreasonable to disallow appeals to non-controversial religious propositions from the public forum while beliefs further removed from credulity are available for justificatory use. However, if such unsavory views are preemptively excised from possible use in the public square by fiat, then we run the risk of returning to the pre-Enlightenment age, in which the only way to change the orthodoxy of received thinking within a nation is through revolution. Clearly, this is absurd. Thus, the restriction of religious speech in support of a particular law or constitutional composition cannot be proposed on the grounds of its unique controversy, given the free pass allowed to other, potentially even more controversial, positions.

The necessary importance of ends to formulating law

Even ignoring the galaxy of controversial facts, there remains the impossibility of finding use for any raw fact without a system of goals to give it meaning. Facts are only useful for the creation of policy in the degree to which they help us realize some goal. However, having goals of one sort or another, no matter how limited in scope or seemingly universal, necessarily puts outer limits on the acceptable means of pursuing the good life. For example, by having the goal of allowing people to live without the fear of external violence, we necessarily prevent those who believe that the gods demand involuntary human sacrifice from pursuing their vision of the good life. Though the scope of liberal goals is quite small, consisting in the main of allowing people to live together peaceably, it nevertheless necessarily prohibits the pursuit of some other goals which are contrary to it. Therefore, it is quixotic in the extreme to try dispel all comprehensive schemes from the justification of legislation for the simple reason that liberal aims are themselves comprehensive in their desire to allow the pursuit of a plurality of individually ascertained goods. If liberalism limits the majority to only acting legislation for ends that can be assented to by all, then it enacts no legislation, for there are no ends that must assented to by all potential citizens a priori. Even goals as strongly and widely endorsed as life and happiness can find some opponent, in theory at least, for there are no simple goods that are assented to by all. If there were, then would already be consensus about the nature of good life, and hence no need to implement liberalism. Liberalism is the result of a lack of consensus about the nature of the good life, not a surfeit. However, with no goods to implement, there are no laws that can be endorsed, because laws are only enacted as a means to achieve some end. Thus, restricting legislative debate to only those proposals that might gain universal endorsement would inhibit the creation of legislation whatsoever.

For this reason, there can be no single formula that assures the preservation the minority rights in all cases. Minority preferences cannot be respected in all theoretical circumstances, because it is possible for minority groups to be violently anti-liberal. Should such groups be given free reign, they would necessarily institute the dismantling of liberal society by the very nature of our specification of the group as anti-liberal. This naturally leads to a dilemma about which rights to respect for which minorities that cannot be resolved a priori. However, fortunately, in the empirical world, we are not troubled by theoretical anti-liberal groups, but actual groups of indeterminate composition. Such groups may be liberal, non-liberal, or anti-liberal as lead by chance and circumstances. Given this fact, it is therefore incumbent upon liberal society to at minimum, persuade anti-liberal groups to become merely non-liberal, and preferably to demonstrate to all non-liberal groups the advantages of accepting liberalism. In other words, the only ensure the continued existence of liberal states is through the promotion of liberal polities. Perhaps, as a basic matter of fairness or a pragmatic desire to avoid engendering resentment, protections of liberal society ought not be worked into the constitutional framework of a liberal state itself. Nevertheless, it still remains necessary for a liberal polity to be promoted by either passive or active means as demanded by the situation. Simultaneously, in order for a liberal polity to retain its status as liberal, the majority must listen to the demands of actual, existing minority groups in order to keep from infringing on their rights, where doing so does not jeopardize the continuation of the state as liberal. Thus, rather than specify in advance that the majority only advance those goals that can be advanced on rational merits alone as Audi’s principles demand, the liberal polity will advance the goals of the majority, so long as those goals do not substantially infringe on the rights of real minorities.

It may seem counterintuitive then that if liberal society must be merely tolerant of non-liberals and actively opposed to anti-liberals, that it should nevertheless refrain from enshrining liberal rationales as the only ones acceptable for legislative legitimacy. The practical reason for this freedom, above the impossibility of having liberal consensus without specified ends as mentioned before, is that to attempt to limit approved speech is likely to be counterproductive, as by stifling the expression of non-liberal energies, it potentially converts them to anti-liberal ones. The religious majority that sees itself turned away at the ballot box will almost inevitably respond by attempting to express its values through other means. In such a case that the reasoning of the majority is otherwise uncontroversial to society, it creates needless strife by antagonizing their values. In such a case that the majority is imposing on an existing (non-theoretical) minority, constitutional limitations may hinder the majority, but no constitutional principle can long withstand the determined majority. The result is the dissolution of the liberality of the state in question. Instead, proponents of liberalism must dissuade the majority from actively irritating the minority by persuading them using the strongest reasoning available. This reasoning will almost certainly come from the private reasoning of the group itself. As Rawls himself notes, “Surely, the most fundamental questions should be settled by appealing to the most important truths, yet these may far transcend public reason” (216). He claims that the diverse nature of society ensures that society must be justified without respect to any one comprehensive doctrine. However, it seems that society could also function while justifying itself separately to each comprehensive doctrine. Society is not prevented from doing so by a shortage of scholars willing to craft new arguments, and the result would be a stronger commitment to the ideals of liberal society by adherents of the various comprehensive doctrines. The key is drawing support from within the private reason of the group in order to bolster liberalism as a whole. The result of this activity is that the dream of a monolithic theory of liberalism is cast aside in favor of a thousand liberalisms, each with a justification particular to group that supports it for their own private reasons. The only limitation is that participants accept the fundamental political equality of all human beings such that the non-infringing rights of minority groups are preserved and that they are willing to debate among other groups rationally. These limitations must not come as preconditions, but as a result of the internal deliberation of each group in particular. Rawls, of course, sees the need for private reasoning to convince groups of the merits of a liberal state prior to its ordering, but he fails to see that this process cannot end with the settling of constitutional principles, but must continue perpetually, bringing forth new liberal commitments from within each comprehensive doctrine, as there is no viable means of imposing liberal commitments from without.

As the search for a monolithic liberal theory is abandoned, it natural to review what is lost in abandoning it. The goal of monolithic liberalism is to make a state which by the logical clarity of its nature must be accepted by all rational parties. It is hoped that by using the right formulation of veils of ignorance and states of nature, that one could rationally force all parties to assent to the basic justice and decency of the liberal state so-conceived. Put thusly, it should be readily apparent how clearly the quest for a monolithic liberalism was itself the expression of a comprehensive doctrine: the comprehensive doctrine of permitting the flourishing of all comprehensive doctrines. However, since some comprehensive doctrines entail the foregoing of other comprehensive doctrines, the flourishing of all is not logically possible. Fortunately, we have an alternative in allowing the flourishing of doctrines which themselves are organically disposed to allow the flourishing of other means of pursuing the good life, namely those that are conditioned to tolerate minority rights.

(:title “Frameworks for acceptable debate in a liberal society.”:)

Audi begins by reviewing the animating principles of liberal democracy. He refers to those principles that govern the relation of the state to religion as the libertarian principle, the equalitarian principle, and the neutrality principle (39†). The libertarian principle is that the state must allow the citizens to persist in any religious belief or engage in any religious practice so long as they do not infringe on the rights of others. The equalitarian principle maintains that the state must not promote any one religion over another. The neutrality principle holds that “the state should neither favor nor disfavor religion” (39). With this background in place, Audi proceeds to his proposition that liberal interests are best served by ensuring that laws are justified on non-religious grounds, beginning with the idea of religious obligation. Essentially, Audi argues that from the “Hebraic-Christian tradition,” believers are obligated to find a “theo-ethical equilibrium” between obligations to personal moral understanding and conduct within the state. The key to reaching this equilibrium is, in Audi’s view, observing the principle of secular rationale and the principle of secular motivation. As previously stated the principle of secular rational indicates the necessity of justifying all proposed laws in secular language, so that all citizens can equally consider the merits of the law in question. The principle of secular motivation expands this concept by requiring that the secular justification given for a policy proposal be sufficient to motivate the promotion that it is given. In other words, one should not promote a law unless it is for an honestly secular reason.

The existence of other controversial claims

The necessary importance of ends to law

The limits of liberalism in preserving minority rights

A liberalism that makes life safe for liberals, or at least those not antagonistic to liberalism, is not to be undervalued, however. Recall that the impetus for forming liberalism in the first place was the desire to escape the internecine warfare of the early modern era. The compromise that slowly emerged was the non-interference of government in matters of conscience. At first, this was justified on purely the purely Christian grounds that salvation was an individual, not collective matter, so it was non-productive to enforce membership in particular sects of Protestantism. As time went on, this compromise expanded to the granting of rights not only to minority Christian groups, but to the rights of conscience for other minority religions as well. This sentiment was expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the famous aphorism, “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” In other words, so long as minority groups do not interfere with your pursuit of private goods, it does not matter what internal beliefs they hold. Thus, the rights of the minority to their own beliefs are protected to the extent that they refrain from interfering with the public pursuit of the good. However, in those cases where the minority hold beliefs about the good that, if pursued, would interfere with the pursuit of the good by the majority, liberalism necessarily falls into a trap, in which either the rights of the majority or those of the minority must unfortunately but necessarily be sacrificed.

For this reason, there can be no single formula that assures the preservation the minority rights in all cases. Minority preferences cannot be respected in all theoretical circumstances, because it is possible for minority groups to be violently anti-liberal. Should such groups be given free reign, they would necessarily institute the dismantling of liberal society by the very nature of our specification of the group as anti-liberal. This naturally leads to a dilemma about which rights to respect for which minorities that cannot be resolved a priori. However, fortunately, in the empirical world, we are not troubled by theoretical anti-liberal groups, but actual groups of indeterminate composition. Such groups may be liberal, non-liberal, or anti-liberal as lead by chance and circumstances. Given this fact, it is therefore incumbent upon liberal society to at minimum, persuade anti-liberal groups to become merely non-liberal, and preferably to demonstrate to all non-liberal groups the advantages of accepting liberalism. In other words, the only ensure the continued existence of liberal states is through the promotion of liberal polities. Perhaps, as a basic matter of fairness or a pragmatic desire to avoid engendering resentment, protections of liberal society ought not be worked into the constitutional framework of a liberal state itself. Nevertheless, it still remains necessary for a liberal polity to be promoted by either passive or active means as demanded by the situation.

The need for liberal state to have organically liberal polities

The best way to do so is informally insisting that all members of society accept for some justification the political equality of all human beings, though not necessarily the same one. Civil society has no business regulating the beliefs of others or the reasons for those beliefs, but liberal democracy only works on the premise that its citizens accept the political equality of mankind and the need for rational debate. Members of society may hold alternate opinions, and though government may not specify the means by which this conclusion is reached, it is in fact within the bounds of its authority to promote respect our equality. It is our equality which insists that no one religion use civil authority to promote its own interests above those of others. Accepting the equality of people means accepting their equal right to choice their religious beliefs, whether we agree or not. Furthermore, in accepting people’s equality, one also accepts that the state cannot promote one’s own religion without promoting other religions by the same principle. It is for this reason that liberal societies renounced government control of religion in the first place. History has shown that equality and debate are sufficient guides to human conduct to ensure the continuation of liberal government, and therefore these principles are sufficient to ensure the preservation of rights within society and those of all rational members of society.

As Francis Fukuyama rightly noted, in the twentieth century, popular sovereignty came to be the theoretical basis for legitimacy in almost every nation on earth. Democracies and even dictatorships all claim their right to lead from the purported will of the people (if not the actual will). The only other model of government legitimacy in wide practice is that in which the leaders claim that their authority comes from God. For the world to become a place of toleration for all, liberalism must proceed from uncontroversial premises. By premising liberalism organically out from the values of existing traditions, it will be far easier to persuade non-liberal communities of the advantages of liberalism, and to maintain support for liberalism in existing liberal societies. Attempting to construct a monolithic, independent liberalism is tempting, but ultimately foolhardy, as it risks being rejected as competing comprehensive doctrine. As we can see, attempts to integrate liberalism into existing traditions have already succeeded in a variety of cultures around the world. Liberalism arose originally in the Protestant West following the Reformation, but has spread to numerous other cultures by showing its efficacy in preserving social goods favored in those cultures as well. The key is to recognize that each society necessarily has goods that works to preserve, and liberalism should not cripple itself by disallowing public reference to those privately goods, were it even possible to do so. If then the conclusion of the matter is that religious arguments cannot be excluded from the public realm, how is society to keep the religious majority from imposing its views on the minority? By convincing the polity using its own measures of the disaster that results from doing so. In the support of a liberal state, there is no substitute for having a liberal polity.

†Sadly, the page numbers referenced here are specific to a booklet composed by the professor of my “Law, Justice and the State” class and time constraints prevent me from cross-referencing them.

Perhaps the key achievement of early political liberalism was the pacifying of those who wished to use the power of the state to promote a particular religion and sanctions others. This was done by divorcing religious conviction from civil legislation and coercion. Starting with Locke and his contemporaries in the aftermath of the religious wars of Europe, philosophers embarked on project to show that such ideological regulation results not merely in potentially destructive battles against “heretics,” but also that it is contrary to rational morality to attempt to impose a religious viewpoint on others through the application of governmental power. Perhaps reflecting the perceived success of these efforts, some moral and political philosophers have additionally sought to limit the acceptable terms of debate within a liberal society to those that can be justified to the public as a whole, and not merely to those who subscribe to particular religious creeds or other comprehensive doctrines.

At issue is whether it is necessary to make a wall of separation, formally or informally, between secular and religious arguments in public debate in order to prevent the religiously motivated from infringing on the rights of others. To this end, Robert Audi urges the employment of twin principles of secular rational and secular motivation, the latter meaning all propositions in a public debate should be argued on secular merits and former meaning that those merits must be a sufficiently compelling motivation for the advocacy lent a particular policy, not a covert religious agenda. John Rawls recommends that debate about constitutional principles be limited to “public reason,” that is ideas which are not the product of any comprehensive doctrine, religious or secular. Opposingly, Philip Quinn and others advocate that only the barest of restraints be placed on public debate. I shall consider each system in turn before advancing my thesis that for both theoretical and practical reasons, it is not only undesirable to exclude comprehensive doctrines from public debate, but it is ultimately impossible as well. Instead, there is no shortcut to creating and maintaining a liberal society other than having a liberal populace, and having a liberal populace is in turn dependent on grounding arguments for liberalism specifically in such a way as to have maximum appeal to all groups.

Audi begins by reviewing the animating principles of liberal democracy. He refers to those principles that govern the relation of the state to religion as the libertarian principle, the equalitarian principle, and the neutrality principle (39*). The libertarian principle is that the state must allow the citizens to persist in any religious belief or engage in any religious practice so long as they do not infringe on the rights of others. The equalitarian principle maintains that the state must not promote any one religion over another. The neutrality principle holds that “the state should neither favor nor disfavor religion” (39). With this background in place, Audi proceeds to his proposition that liberal interests are best served by ensuring that laws are justified on non-religious grounds, beginning with the idea of religious obligation. Essentially, Audi argues that from the “Hebraic-Christian tradition,” believers are obligated to find a “theo-ethical equilibrium” between obligations to personal moral understanding and conduct within the state. The key to reaching this equilibrium is, in Audi’s view, observing the principle of secular rationale and the principle of secular motivation. As previously stated the principle of secular rational indicates the necessity of justifying all proposed laws in secular language, so that all citizens can equally consider the merits of the law in question. The principle of secular motivation expands this concept by requiring that the secular justification given for a policy proposal be sufficient to motivate the promotion that it is given. In other words, one should not promote a law unless it is for an honestly secular reason.

While Audi’s principles may be useful in certain circumstance, it seems odd that these rules are focused exclusively on religion. If it is true that religious arguments should be excluded from public debate because they cannot be accepted all members of society, then certainly there are secular arguments that are similarly controversial, and thus must also be exluded. A Randian might still object to the public promotion of utilitarianism, a utilitarian might object to the promotion of Kantian values, and so forth. Audi’s view is too narrowly focused on religious views as uniquely controversial.

Accordingly, Rawls widens the varieties of disfavored speech. He presents the ideal of public reason as a means of ensuring the use of the state’s coercive power is always justified in such a way that—in principle—all rational citizens could accept it. When deciding “constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice,” Rawls maintains that a virtuous citizen will limit the discourse to public reason, as a means of ensuring the justice of the debate. Public reason is the language in which debate must be conducted in order to ensure universal acceptability. To begin, Rawls defines nonpublic reason as the values endorsed only within individuals groups, be they “churches and universities, scientific societies and professional groups,” or whatever else (220). Within these different segments of societies, different means and measures are used to resolve questions, so while a scientist might answer the question, “What do we know about human life?” by doing experiments, the clergyman would answer by consulting scriptures, and the insurance actuary by consulting tables of statistics and policy rates. Each of these methods may be valid within its domain, but in the larger public sphere, a different means of debate is needed. Furthermore, if public reason is to be given for the consideration of all, Rawls states that it must not rely on the acceptance of any comprehensive doctrine. The language of public reason instead makes reference to our shared rights, the principles of reasoning, general beliefs, common sense, and other propositions justifiable to someone in the original position. From the fabric of these, it may in some cases be easy to make principles to which all can agree. However, in those times when disagreements persist even having referenced public reason, it is up to the electorate to vote according to the each citizen’s understanding of the implications of public reason.

Rawls does suggest some limitations on the strict application of public reason, however. In the case of a less ordered society, it may be necessary to appeal to commonly held comprehensive doctrines in order to advance the rights of all citizens and ideals of public reason. In other words, it is permissible to use means of reasoning other than public reason if the result of the debate is to create a more ordered society, which adheres more closely to the ideal of public reason.

Quinn’s objections

The entanglement of doctrine and law

Furthering Quinn’s objections to those who would limit debate, it is worth observing the many ways in which religious and secular matters ultimately are inseparably overlapping. Christian Science claims that modern, secular medicine is essentially a sham. Yet, most liberal states aim at delivering quality healthcare to some or all of their citizens. Islamist extremists insist that Allah’s will is the restoration of the caliphate government and the abolition of pluralist democracy, yet liberal states continue to insist on their right to be. Jainists claim that any almost action undertaken by a human being is a sin for it increasing the suffering in the world by harming plants and animals among other things, yet liberal states seek economic expansion rather than repose. Moreover, not only do liberal states passively ignore the claims of various religious believers, they actively refute them. Publicly funded scientists claim that Genesis cannot be considered to have a basis in literal truth. The United States government forced the Japanese emperor to admit his non-divinity. The children of Christian Scientists are forced to take vaccines. These examples are not merely exceptions to the general pattern of religious and secular distinguishability but indicative of the intertwined nature of the two. The majority of religions make claims about the nature of material world as well as the spiritual one, which necessarily leads to conflicts of authority with secular institutions. The religious and secular cannot be disentangled as neatly as one would like to hope.

Moreover, it is not merely religiously held convictions that puzzle society. Some advocates see global warming as looming threat to earth’s habitability, while others dismiss the possibility. Some feel that genetically modified foods should be carefully regulated in order to protect the population from possible ill effects, while others feel that such concerns are overblown. Is HIV really the AIDs virus? Do cellphones cause cancer? Is it safe to put fluoride into the drinking water? Certainly, a large majority of scientists have an opinion about such matters (yes, no, yes), but this does not stop a persistent minority of population from questioning them. Nevertheless, the state seems to be free to act as though perfect consensus exists in these cases, when in fact, the consensus is actually only very strong.

Even beyond potentially ethereal questions of religious injunctions and scientific theories, some citizens question received historical facts such as the Holocaust, though it was observed by millions of witnesses. Still others see conspiracies surrounding Pearl Harbor, Kennedy’s assignation, and the September 11 attacks. If it is not fair to exclude these views from possibility of use in legislation, though they seem to be quite demonstrably false, then it seems unreasonable to disallow appeals to non-controversial religious propositions from the public forum while beliefs further removed from credulity are available for justificatory use. However, if such unsavory views are preemptively excised from possible use in the public square by fiat, then we run the risk of returning to the pre-Enlightenment age, in which the only way to change the orthodoxy of received thinking within a nation is through revolution. Clearly, this is absurd.

Even ignoring the galaxy of controversial facts, there remains the impossibility of finding use for any raw fact without a system of goals to give it meaning. Facts are only useful for the creation of policy in the degree to which they help us realize some goal. However, having goals of one sort or another, no matter how limited in scope or seemingly universal, necessarily puts outer limits on the acceptable means of pursuing the good life. For example, by having the goal of allowing people to live without the fear of external violence, we necessarily prevent those who believe that the gods demand involuntary human sacrifice from pursuing their vision of the good life. Though the scope of liberal goals is quite small, consisting in the main of allowing people to live together peaceably, it nevertheless necessarily prohibits the pursuit of some other goals which are contrary to it. We see then that it is quixotic in the extreme to try dispel all comprehensive schemes from the justification of legislation for the simple reason that liberal aims are themselves comprehensive in their desire to allow the pursuit of a plurality of individually ascertained goods.

The importance of having a liberal populace

Liberalism may now seem self-negating. If the goal of liberal society is to allow pursuit of individual ascribed goals, yet liberalism itself necessarily curtails the freedom to pursue certain goals, the question remains what precisely liberalism can do. The answer is that while liberalism cannot protect the rights of groups postulated to be antagonistic to liberal principles, liberalism is able to preserve the rights of actual minority groups within a liberal society, provided that they accept the fundamentals of liberalism as well. While it may first seem a bit disappointing that liberalism is only for liberals, on closer inspection, it seems impossible to imagine how liberalism could be propagated by any other means.

There is no magic formula that can be applied to preserve ensure the minority rights. Minority preferences cannot be respected in all cases, because some minority groups are anti-liberal. Should such groups be given free reign, they would necessarily institute the dismantling of liberal society by the very nature of our specification of the group as anti-liberal. This naturally leads to a dilemma about which rights to respect for which minorities that cannot be resolved a priori. However, fortunately, in the empirical world, we are not troubled by theoretical anti-liberal groups, but actual groups of indeterminate composition. Such groups may be liberal, non-liberal, or anti-liberal as lead by chance and circumstances. Given this fact, it is therefore incumbent upon liberal society to at minimum, persuade anti-liberal groups to become merely non-liberal, and preferably to demonstrate to all non-liberal groups the advantages of accepting liberalism. In other words, the only ensure the continued existence of liberal states is through the promotion of liberal polities. Perhaps, as a basic matter of fairness or a pragmatic desire to avoid engendering resentment, protections of liberal society ought not be worked into the constitutional framework of a liberal state itself. Nevertheless, it still remains necessary for a liberal polity to be promoted by either passive or active means as demanded by the situation.

It may seem counterintuitive then that if liberal society must be merely tolerant of non-liberals and actively opposed to anti-liberals, that it should nevertheless refrain from enshrining liberal rationales as the only ones acceptable for legislative legitimacy. The reason is that to attempt to do so is likely to be counterproductive, as by stifling the expression of non-liberal energies, it potentially converts them to anti-liberal ones. The religious majority that sees itself turned away at the ballot box will almost inevitably respond by attempting to express its values through other means. In such a case that the reasoning of the majority is otherwise uncontroversial to society, it creates needless strife by antagonizing their values. In such a case that the majority is imposing on an existing (non-theoretical) minority, constitutional limitations will hinder the majority, but no constitutional principle can long withstand the determined majority. Instead, proponents of liberalism must dissuade the majority from actively irritating the minority by persuading them using the strongest reasoning available. This reasoning will almost certainly come from the private reasoning of the group itself. As Rawls himself notes, “Surely, the most fundamental questions should be settled by appealing to the most important truths, yet these may far transcend public reason” (216). He claims that the diverse nature of society ensures that society must be justified without respect to any one comprehensive doctrine. However, it seems that society could also function while justifying itself separately to each comprehensive doctrine. Society is not prevented from doing so by a shortage of scholars willing to craft new arguments, and the result would be a stronger commitment to the ideals of liberal society by adherents of the various comprehensive doctrines. The key is drawing support from within the private reason of the group in order to bolster liberalism as a whole. The result of this activity is that the dream of a monolithic theory of liberalism is cast aside in favor of a thousand liberalisms, each with a justification particular to group that supports it for their own private reasons. The only limitation is to ensure that participants accept the fundamental political equality of all human beings and are willing to debate among other groups rationally, and this, not as a precondition, but as a result of the internal deliberation of each group in particular. Rawls, of course, sees the need for private reasoning to convince groups of the merits of a liberal state prior to its ordering, but he fails to see that this process cannot end with the settling of constitutional principles, but must continue perpetually, bringing forth new liberal commitments from within each comprehensive doctrine, as there is no viable means of imposing liberal commitments from without.

As the search for a monolithic liberal theory is abandoned, it natural to review what is lost in abandoning it. The goal of monolithic liberalism is to make a state which by the logical clarity of its nature must be accepted by all rational parties. It is hoped that by using the right formulation of veils of ignorance and states of nature, that one could rationally force all parties to assent to the basic justice and decency of the liberal state so-conceived. Put thusly, it should be readily apparent how clearly the quest for a monolithic liberalism was itself the expression of a comprehensive doctrine: the comprehensive doctrine of permitting the flourishing of all comprehensive doctrines. However, since some comprehensive doctrines entail the foregoing of other comprehensive doctrines, the flourishing of all is not logically possible. Fortunately, we have an alternative in allowing the flourishing of doctrines which themselves are organically disposed to allow the flourishing of other means of pursuing the good life.

The utility of unlimited dialogue

In an age of increasingly visible religious strife and violence, there is no time to wait for the development of pluralistic consensus in each of the many civilizations of the world. Instead, liberalism must make its stealthy spread outward from the marketplace, in which the rational and reasonable engage in the far less controversial business of tolerant society. As Francis Fukuyama rightly noted, in the twentieth century, popular sovereignty came to be the theoretical basis for legitimacy in almost every nation on earth. Democracies and even dictatorships all claim their right to lead from the purported will of the people (if not the actual will). The only other model of government legitimacy in wide practice is that in which the leaders claim that their authority comes from God. For the world to become a place of toleration for all, liberalism must proceed from uncontroversial premises. Larmore’s minimum moral conception does just that, but pluralistic visions are too far removed from the facts of this world to be useful for dealing with competing frameworks of legitimacy. Though perhaps equal respect and rational dialogue are not yet universally held principles, they are indeed the barest requirements of liberalism and it can only be hoped that in time they will spread, to the betterment of all.

*Sadly, the page numbers referenced here are specific to a booklet composed by the professor of my “Law, Justice and the State” class and time constraints prevent me from cross-referencing them.

(:title "Towards a framework for debate within and in support of liberal society.":) (:toc Sections:)

Introduction

Perhaps the key achievement of early political liberalism was the pacifying of those who wished to use the power of the state to promote the religion that they personally held to be true through use of force or other sanctions against other religious groups and the imposition of other laws in order to benefit the practitioners of their beliefs. This was done by divorcing religious conviction from civil legislation and coercion. Starting with Locke and his contemporaries in the aftermath of the religious wars of Europe, philosophers embarked on project to show that such ideological regulation results not merely in potentially destructive battles against “heretics,” but also that it is contrary to rational morality to attempt to impose a religious viewpoint on others through the application of governmental power. Perhaps reflecting the perceived success of these efforts, some moral and political philosophers have additionally sought to limit the acceptable terms of debate within a liberal society to those that can be justified to the public as a whole, and not merely to those who subscribe to particular religious creeds or other comprehensive doctrines.

At issue is whether it is necessary to make a wall of separation, formally or informally, between secular and religious arguments in public debate in order to prevent the religiously motivated from infringing on the rights of others. To this end, Robert Audi urges the employment of twin principles of secular rational and secular motivation, the latter meaning all propositions in a public debate should be argued on secular merits and former meaning that those merits must be a sufficiently compelling motivation for the advocacy lent a particular policy, not a covert religious agenda. John Rawls recommends that debate be limited to “public reason,” that is ideas which are not the product of any comprehensive doctrine, secular or religious. Charles Larmore advocates the use of only a “minimal moral conception” to ground politically liberal principles without potentially controversial notions of the good life. Opposingly, Philip Quinn and others advocate that only the barest of restraints be placed on public debate. I shall consider each system in turn before advancing my thesis that for both theoretical and practical reasons, it is not only undesirable to exclude comprehensive doctrines from public debate, but it is ultimately impossible as well. Instead, there is no shortcut to creating and maintaining a liberal society other than having a liberal populace, and having a liberal populace is in turn dependent on grounding arguments for liberalism specifically in such a way as to have maximum appeal to all groups.

Review of positions

Audi’s principles

Audi begins by reviewing the animating principles of liberal democracy. He refers to those principles that govern the relation of the state to religion as the libertarian principle, the equalitarian principle, and the neutrality principle (39*). The libertarian principle is that the state must allow the citizen to persist in any religious belief or engage in any religious practice so long as they do not infringe on the rights of others. The equalitarian principle maintains that the state must not promote any one religion over another. The neutrality principle holds that “the state should neither favor nor disfavor religion” (39). With this background in place, Audi proceeds to his proposition that liberal interests are best served by ensuring that laws are justified on non-religious grounds, beginning with the idea of religious obligation. Essentially, Audi argues that from the “Hebraic-Christian tradition,” believers are obligated to find a “theo-ethical equilibrium” between obligations to personal moral understanding and conduct within the state. The key to reaching this equilibrium is, in Audi’s view, observing the principle of secular rationale and the principle of secular motivation. As previously stated the principle of secular rational indicates the necessity of justifying all proposed laws in secular language, so that all citizens can equally consider the merits of the law in question. The principle of secular motivation expands this concept by requiring that the secular justification given for a policy proposal be sufficient to motivate the promotion that it is given. In other words, one should not promote a law unless it is for an honestly secular reason.

Rawls’ public reason

While Audi’s principles may be useful in certain circumstance, it seems odd that these rules are focused exclusively on religion. If it is true that religious arguments should be excluded from public debate because they cannot be accepted all members of society, then certainly there are secular arguments that are similarly controversial and thus must also be exluded. A Randian might still object to the public promotion of utilitarianism, a utilitarian might object to the promotion of Kantian values, and so forth. Audi’s view is too narrowly focused on religious views as uniquely controversial.

Accordingly, Rawls widens the varieties of excluded speech. He presents the ideal of public reason as a means of ensuring the use of the state’s coercive power is always justified in such a way that—in principle—all rational citizens could accept it. When deciding “constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice,” Rawls maintains that a virtuous citizen will limit the discourse to public reason, as a means of ensuring the justice of the debate. Public reason is the language in which debate must be conducted in order to ensure universal acceptability. To begin, Rawls defines nonpublic reason as the values endorsed only within individuals groups, be they “churches and universities, scientific societies and professional groups,” or whatever else (220). Within these different segments of societies, different means and measures are used to resolve questions, so while a scientist might answer the question, “What do we know about human life?” by doing experiments, the clergyman would answer by consulting scriptures, and the insurance actuary by consulting tables of statistics and policy rates. Each of these methods may be valid within its domain, but in the larger public sphere, a different means of debate is needed. Furthermore, if public reason is to be given for the consideration of all, Rawls states that it must not rely on the acceptance of any comprehensive doctrine. The language of public reason instead makes reference to our shared rights, the principles of reasoning, general beliefs, common sense, and other propositions justifiable to someone in the original position. From the fabric of these, it may in some cases be easy to make principles to which all can agree. However, in those times when disagreements persist even having referenced public reason, it is up to the electorate to vote according to the each citizen’s understanding of the implications of public reason.

Rawls does suggest some limits for public reason, however. In the case of a less ordered society, it may be necessary to appeal to commonly held comprehensive doctrines in order to advance the rights of all citizens and ideals of public reason. In other words, it is permissible to use means of reasoning other than public reason if the result of the debate is to create a more ordered society, which adheres more closely to the ideal of public reason.

Larmore’s minimum moral conception

In contrast, Larmore aims to define the “minimal moral conception” that can in his opinion ground politically liberal principles without utilizing controversial notions of the good life (123). Larmore begins by explaining that the controversy surrounding notions of the good life is not merely a matter of lack of dialogue between those different understandings. Even granting that it was possible to explain to a reasonable person the error of their belief system and correctness of some other with recourse only to commonly accepted logic and premises, even still some would reasonably persist in doubt and difference. The acceptance of this persistent empirical fact need not been seen as an endorsement of a pluralistic conception of truth by liberalism. Rather, given the necessity of maintaining a society even in the face of a diverse constituency, liberalism is seen as an appropriate means of balancing the interests of different social groups. However, taking recourse to controversial notions like pluralism can only hinder the goal of a peaceful populace. As such, the aforementioned “minimum moral conception” that Larmore presents is the norm of rational dialogue and the norm of equal respect of persons. Larmore sees the immense necessity of dialogue in maintaining society. Only by retreating to the common ground of public debate can one group hope to bring others to share its viewpoint. Dialogue further allows us to understand the thinking of others and builds mutual sympathy. However, as Larmore points out, dialogue can only go so far. When it becomes apparent that dialogue is no longer a viable means of reaching consensus, it must be insisted that equal respect is observed, lest the situation degenerate into violence.

Larmore spends considerable time in his essay contemplating the viability of political liberalism to those who value tradition over individual choice in their conception of the good life. He contrast political liberalism with a comprehensive liberal notion of individuality. Many cultures in the world prize the continuance of tradition, not as a rational choice of each adherent, but as constituent part of an individual’s sense of self. It because such conceptional frameworks are reasonable, that truly rational society cannot resort to anything so tempting—but controversial—as a system of comprehensive liberalism as a justification for its composition, since the focus of liberalism on the individual necessarily excludes more socially based means of constructing an identity.

Quinn

Quinn outlines his case by noting objections to Audi and Rawls. Essentially, Quinn sees Audi and Rawls as proposing a voluntary censorship for those who have political views that cannot be justified in secular terms. Before examining his view, let us examine to an example of the use of public reason. Rawls claims in a footnote that the abortion debate can be resolved as a constitutional matter appealing to public reason. It is a simple matter of balancing the rights of a woman with the good of letting the fetus develop. Thus, concludes Rawls, abortion should not be prohibited. However, the view set forth by Rawls relies on a comprehensive framework for interpreting the rights of a fetus. In a case such as this, there is no way to make an argument that does not run aground on the rocks of comprehensive doctrine. Continuing the example of abortion, were someone to oppose abortion on purely religious grounds, Audi and Rawls would have her bow out of the debate until she can provide non-religious and non-comprehensive reasoning for such a prohibition. However, to limit someone’s rights to free speech and rights to participate in the rational dialogue of democracy, it seems that a strong justification is required. Moreover, this exclusion of religiously motivated speech seems even harder to rationalize in light of the eminent controversy of some secular arguments and the comparative universality of some religious doctrines. Quinn asserts there is no basis for excluding certain accepted arguments due to their religious nature while simultaneously allowing more controversial arguments due to their purportedly secular nature. However, to restrict the debate to only universally accepted propositions is to invite anarchy, since reasonable people can and do disagree about nearly every line of argument. Public reason, argues Quinn, is decidedly weak, and any attempt to build a foundation for liberal society on it is bound to crack under the weight. Both Audi and Rawls craft exceptions to their exclusionary systems to improve their general acceptability, says Quinn, but it would be easier to abandon the systems all together. Certainly, historically in America, a semi-liberal democracy has held together in spite of whatever pressures have been put on it by those who have used religious language as a part of public discourse. If anything allowing more dialogue is helpful, as it encourages more comprehensive frameworks to incorporate liberal principles independently, even as liberalism persists without recourse to any single justification.

Objections to the limiting public discourse

The lack of certainty about what constitutes public information

Furthering Quinn’s objections to those who would limit debate, it is worth observing the many ways in which religious matter and secular matters ultimately are inseparably overlapping. Christian Science claims that modern, secular medicine is essentially a sham. Yet, most liberal states aim at delivering quality healthcare to some or all of their citizens. Islamist extremists insist that Allah’s will is the restoration of the caliphate government and the abolition of pluralist democracy, yet liberal states continue to insist on their right to be. Jainists claim that any almost action undertaken by a human being is a sin for it increasing the suffering in the world by harming plants and animals among other things, yet liberal states seek economic expansion rather than repose. Moreover, not only do liberal states passively ignore the claims of various religious believers, they actively refute them. Publicly funded scientists claim that Genesis cannot be considered to have a basis in literal truth. The United States government forced the Japanese emperor to admit his non-divinity. The majority of religions make claims about the nature of material world as well as the spiritual one, which necessarily leads to conflicts of authority with secular institutions. The children of Christian Scientists are forced to take vaccines. These examples are not merely exceptions to the general pattern of religious and secular distinguishability but indicative of the intertwined nature of the two. The religious and secular cannot be disentangled as neatly as one would like to hope.

Moreover, it is not merely religiously held convictions that puzzle society. Some advocates see global warming as looming threat to earth’s habitability, while others dismiss the possibility. Some feel that genetically modified foods should be carefully regulated in order to protect the population from possible ill effects, while others feel that such concerns are overblown. Is HIV really the AIDs virus? Do cellphones cause cancer? Is it safe to put fluoride into the drinking water? Certainly, a large majority of scientists have an opinion about such matters (yes, no, yes), but this does not stop a persistent minority of population from questioning them.

Even beyond potentially ethereal questions of religious injunctions and scientific theories, some citizens question received historical facts such as the true cause of the Civil War or see conspiracies surrounding Pearl Harbor, Kennedy’s assignation, and the September 11 attacks. Millions of dollars have been made by denying the Holocaust, an ugly incident observed by the naked eyes of millions. If it is not fair to exclude these views from possibility of use in legislation, though they seem to be quite demonstrably false, then it seems unreasonable to disallow non-controversial religious propositions from the public forum while more extreme beliefs are unregulated. However, if such views are excised from the public square by fiat, then we run the risk of returning to the pre-Enlightenment age, in which the only way to change the orthodoxy of received thinking within a nation is to overthrow its leadership.

Even ignoring the galaxy of controversial facts, there remains the impossibility of using any raw fact without a comprehensive doctrine to give it meaning. Does “man is mortal” imply “eat, drink, and be merry,” or “store up for yourself treasures in heaven?” Without a means of application, raw facts are of no value. However, the process of giving facts a value inevitably begets a the creation of doctrine, that while not necessarily comprehensive, has its own domain in which it is incontrovertible, for the simple reason that all complex goods must be predicated on simpler goods which are either taken to be self-evident or left as bare assertions. Liberalism fundamentally rests on a class of simple goods like freedom from violence, the ability to live without undue interference by others, equal rights to all people, and so on, but it cannot help but declare these goods to be self-evident, for there are no simpler goods on which it can base society without alienating some members of society as it exists. To do so is fine in itself, but creates a new comprehensive doctrine in a space that was purposed for being void of them.

We see then that it is quixotic in the extreme to try dispel all comprehensive schemes from the justification of legislation for the simple reason that liberal aims are themselves comprehensive in their desire to allow the pursuit of a plurality of individually ascertained goods.

who is a “rational” citizen?

Problems with minimum morality

Who defines it? Won’t it just end up being whatever 75% of people want, one way or the other? Isn’t that the same as majority rule, only with a different name?

On the impossibility of making non-liberal communities liberal through the requirement of public reason

A) it’s logically impossible. (premise A is suppose non-liberals. therefore, there is no way to reign them in in the conclusion.)

B) it’s practically impossible. (there is no magic set of words that converts non-liberals into liberals.)

C) it’s potentially dangerous. (if you don’t let people dump their poisons, they’ll just end up sublimating it through violence.)

There is no shortcut!

Reasons to support debate without limits

Why limit debate at all? Truth will out!

On the practicality of arguing from within each discourse

Rawls’ system does not fully address an objection he himself raises, “Surely, the most fundamental questions should be settled by appealing to the most important truths, yet these may far transcend public reason” (216). He claims that the diverse nature of society ensures that society must be justified without respect to any one comprehensive doctrine. However, it seems that society could also function while justifying itself separately to each comprehensive doctrine. Society is not prevented from doing so by a shortage of scholars willing to craft new arguments, and the result would be a stronger commitment to the ideals of liberal society by adherents of the various comprehensive doctrines. The key is ensuring the debate is restricted to reasonable participants, which is not to say necessarily those who make only universal arguments, merely that participants accept the fundament equality of all human beings in the political environment and are willing to debate rationally.

On the pragmatic political expediency of unlimited debate

In an age of increasingly visible religious strife and violence, there is no time to wait for the development of pluralistic consensus in each of the many civilizations of the world. Instead, liberalism must make its stealthy spread outward from the marketplace, in which the rational and reasonable engage in the far less controversial business of tolerant society. Perhaps ironically, for pragmatic purposes, Larmore’s position is more inclusive than that of the pluralists, as he leaves room in his society for anyone who can accept the minimum moral conception, regardless of their other exclusivist traits.

Larmore’s conception of political liberalism is far more cogent to the situation. So long as everyone is held to the minimum moral conception, society has a basis for the resolution of debate and the peaceful ordering of society.

As Francis Fukuyama rightly noted, in the twentieth century, popular sovereignty came to be the theoretical basis for legitimacy in almost every nation on earth. Democracies and even dictatorships all claim their right to lead from the purported will of the people (if not the actual will). The only other model of government legitimacy in wide practice is that in which the leaders claim that their authority comes from God. For the world to become a place of toleration for all, liberalism must proceed from uncontroversial premises. Larmore’s minimum moral conception does just that, but pluralistic visions are too far removed from the facts of this world to be useful for dealing with competing frameworks of legitimacy. Though perhaps equal respect and rational dialogue are not yet universally held principles, they are indeed the barest requirements of liberalism and it can only be hoped that in time they will spread, to the betterment of all.

Conclusion

ultimately, talk about the limits of liberalism are moot, because the will of the majority will be done, one way or the other. thus, it behooves us to convince the majority to accept liberalism, rather than insisting on it by fiat. convincing the majority to accept liberalism is best accomplished by working within a tradition.

If then the conclusion of the matter is that religious arguments cannot be excluded from the public realm, how is society to keep the religious majority from imposing its views on the minority? The best way to do so is insisting that all members of society accept for whatever justification the political equality of all human beings. Civil society has no business regulating the beliefs of others or the reasons for those beliefs, but liberal democracy only works on the premise that its citizens accept the political equality of mankind and the need for rational debate. Members of society may hold alternate opinions, but though the government may not specify the means by which this conclusion is reached, it is in fact within the bounds of its authority to promote respect our equality. It is our equality which insists that no one religion use civil authority to promote its own interests above those of others. Accepting the equality of people means accepting their equal right to choice their religious beliefs, whether we agree or not. Furthermore, in accepting people’s equality, one also accepts that the state cannot promote one’s own religion without promoting other religions by the same principle. It is for this reason that liberal societies renounced government control of religion in the first place. History has shown that equality and debate are sufficient guides to human conduct to ensure the continuation of liberal government, and therefore these principles are sufficient to ensure the preservation of rights within society and those of all rational members of society.

• Sadly, the page numbers referenced here are specific to a booklet composed by the professor of my “Law, Justice and the State” class and time constraints prevent me from cross-referencing them.