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1. Introduction
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.
2. Review of positions
2.1 Audi’s principles
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.
2.2 Rawls’ public reason
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 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.
2.3 Quinn’s objections
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.
3. Objections to the limiting public discourse
3.1 The existence of other controversial claims
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.
3.2 Liberal goals are themselves comprehensive
I inserted a missing thought that might help here — the word crippling is where it is. feel free to replace it with whatever
Even if liberalism were to accepting that there are certain claims other than religious ones that are highly controversial, it can might still be argued be claimed that religious ideals and comprehensive doctrines should still be excluded because they are qualitatively different from other controversial ideas, in that because other ideas can be tested empirically. This position is equally as crippling. However, If constitutional justifications laws relying on concepts that are justification outside the realm of Popperian falsification were peremptorily removed sticken 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 not 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 might then also be proposed that liberalism need only find and allow the use of those goals that are commonly held by all. Alternatively, it may 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 can find some have found their 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 would have 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 encounters the difficulty that having because all% goals of one sort or another, no matter how limited in scope or seemingly universal, necessarily puts have outer limits on the acceptable means of pursuing the good life. For example, by having even the goal of allowing people to live without the fear of external violence, would we necessarily prevent those find no quarter among those who believe that the gods demand involuntary human sacrifice from pursuing in their vision of the good life -- for instance, the goals of radical Islam. Though liberal goals have a are small in scope, and 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 the pursuit of some goals precludes the opportunity of pursuing others, 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.
3.3 The limits of liberalism in preserving minority rights
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.
3.4 The need for liberal state to have organically liberal polities
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. 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.
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 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.
4. Conclusion
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.
†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.