Multiculturalism and Moral Conflict

Maria Dimova-Cookson, Peter Stirk

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781135261887
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Multiculturalism is higher on the daily political agenda than it has ever been. Leading politicians and public commentators speak with an unparalleled bluntness about the perceived limitations of multiculturalism while representatives of cultural, minorities express concern about marginalisation. This debate is taking place against a background of fear about terrorism, the integrity of national identities and a loosely construed 'clash of civilizations'. Secularism is pitted against religious fundamentalism, respect for difference against the right of freedom of speech, integration against self-determination, and duties of citizenship against minority rights.

This book confronts the reality of moral conflict in the debate on multiculturalism while resisting the simplification which too frequently accompanies daily commentary on both sides of an increasingly polarised debate. The volume as a whole marks an important step in the attempt to examine the underlying concepts, of the nature and legitimate extent of disagreement, of secularism, the nature of power, the state and citizenship, which inevitably constitute key assumptions in the debate.

Bringing together leading scholars on multiculturalism: Gerald Gaus, Peter Jones, John Horton, Tariq Modood, Chandran Kukathas, Bhikhu Parekh, Matthew Festenstein and Cecile Laborde, this book discusses the latest developments in the field. It will be of strong interest students and scholars of multiculturalism, political science, political theory, international relations, sociology, philosophy and anthropology.

Part I
The moral foundations of multiculturalism

1
The place of religious belief inpublic reason liberalism

Gerald F. Gaus

1 The problem: the status of religious belief in public reason liberalism

In the past few decades a new conception of liberalism has arisen – the ‘public reason view’ – which developed out of contractualist approaches to justifying liberalism. The social contract theories of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau all stressed that the justification of the state depended on showing that everyone would, in some way, consent to it. By relying on consent, social contract theory seemed to suppose a voluntarist conception of political justice and obligation: what is just depends on what people choose to agree to – what they will. As Hume famously pointed out, such accounts seem to imply that ultimately political justice derives from promissory obligations, which the social contract theory leaves unexplained (Hume 1963:452–73). Only in Kant, I think, does it become clear that consent is not fundamental to a social contract view: we have a duty to agree to act according to the idea of the ‘original contract’ (Kant 1999:114–17, 146). Rawls’s revival of social contract theory in A Theory of Justice did not base obligations on consent, though the apparatus of an ‘original agreement’ of sorts persisted. The aim of the original position, Rawls announced, is to settle ‘the question of justification … by working out a problem of deliberation’ (Rawls 1999:16). As the question of public justification takes centre stage (we might say as contractualist liberalism becomes justificatory liberalism), it becomes clear that posing the problem of justification in terms of a deliberative or a bargaining problem is a heuristic: the real issue is ‘the problem of justification’ (Rawls 1999:16) – what principles can be justified to all reasonable persons.

In his Political Liberalism, Rawls is clear that the argument from the original position is just one stage of the justificatory enterprise (Rawls 1996). In Rawls’ later work the idea of public reason becomes increasingly important: the aim is to work out a theory of public reasons – reasons that can be used as a basis of justification that is acceptable to all reasonable citizens. Now although the idea of public reason was implicit in contractual theory all along (see Solum 1993:754–62), sustained focus on it has had a surprising result. Whereas many citizens with deep religious convictions enthusiastically affirmed traditional liberal freedoms of religious belief and expression, explicit public reason views have been widely criticized by those friendly to religion. Once the explicit problem becomes one of public justification and what constitutes acceptable public reasons, it has seemed clear to many that religious-based considerations fail to qualify as such reasons. But if so, public reason liberalism is objectionably exclusionary: reasons that deeply religious citizens see as fundamental to political justice are ruled out of bounds as acceptable public reasons (see Perry 1993). In particular, in the eyes of many of its proponents public reason liberalism is committed to ‘a duty of civility according to which citizens owe each other reasons that they can share …’ (Macedo 2000:35; Rawls 1996:217). This seems to lead to what Christopher J. Eberle calls ‘the principle of restraint’ – ‘a citizen should not support any coercive law for which he lacks a public justification’ (Eberle 2002:68). To some religiously-inclined philosophers, requiring such restraint shows a basic inequity (Greenawalt 1995:120) at the heart of public reason liberalism: those with strong religious-based views about how society is to be ordered are excluded or marginalized in liberal politics. Steve Macedo, an advocate of public reason liberalism, responds: ‘If some people … feel “silenced” or “marginalized” by the fact that some of us believe that it is wrong to seek to shape basic liberties on the basis of religious or metaphysical claims, I can only say “grow up!” ’ (Macedo 2000:35).

This is more than a philosophical impasse: for the liberal it must be truly worrying that those with strong religious commitments have become strident critics of public reason liberalism. A foundational liberal principle has been religious freedom; liberalism has taken religious commitment seriously, and has insisted on the importance of people being able to live according to their avowed religious doctrines. But today those with religious commitments are apt to see themselves as critics of liberalism.

I think both public reason liberals and friends of religion are responsible for their current mutual hostility. Liberals have tended to be much too quick to link public reason to secularism, and so have needlessly alienated those who take their religious views seriously. I shall try to show in this chapter that the status of religious-based reasoning in public reason liberalism is much more complex than most participants in this debate have assumed.¹ Liberals have also, in my view wrongly, insisted that the principle that coercive laws be publicly justified grounds a strong duty of civility or principle of restraint on citizens: if justified laws require reasons of a particular sort, then it is thought that citizens engaging in politics somehow have only to offer only these reasons. I shall argue that it is very difficult to show that any ‘duty of civility’ follows from a commitment to the public justification of coercion. However, liberals are not the only parties at fault. Some religiously-inclined philosophers have advanced extreme claims that they cannot be true to their convictions unless they have a moral liberty to impose (via majority rule) coercive restraints on their fellow citizens that have no justification except through appeal to their faith. Such laws, I argue, would constitute wrongful coercion, failing the test of public justification.

2 The fundamental elements of public reason liberalism

2.1 The (generic) public justification principle

I take as my starting point Eberle’s observation that ‘Respect for others requires public justification of coercion: that is the clarion call of justificatory liberalism’ (Eberle 2002:54). Public reason liberalism ties respecting persons to justifying coercion to those being coerced: in some way, to respect others requires that one refrains from coercing them unless one can provide reasons that, in some way, are accessible to them. Of course, public reason liberals differ among themselves as to how we should understand this general requirement. They disagree, for example, about whether the set of persons to whom justification is owed is restricted (say, to the ‘reasonable’ or to those who possess moral personality), and whether the requirement that reasons be ‘accessible’ means that justification must restrict itself to those reasons which actual people can appreciate, or whether the reasons must be accessible only to idealized persons of some sort (say, those who are fully rational). Public reason liberals also have to specify the conditions under which a reason is accessible – when one thinks about it very hard? After a conversion experience? These debates are fundamental to the details of a public reason liberal theory, but at present our concern is to identify a widely shared generic version, so let us abstract as far as possible from these disagreements.

I propose the following general principle as a point of departure for our discussion.

The Public Justification Principle: A coercive law L is wrongful unless each and every member of the public P has conclusive reason(s) R to accept L.

I leave open just how to specify P (whether the members must all be reasonable, fully rational, etc.). The Public Justification Principle supposes that there is some specification (and almost certainly some idealization) of the public such that each member so described has conclusive reason to accept L. The Public Justification Principle does not suppose that each person must actually accept L; if members of P are idealized, and so the actual citizenry may not perfectly correspond to them, then we should not expect actual endorsement by the citizenry. The question is not what people do accept, but what they would with reason accept.

Although the Public Justification Principle casts its net pretty widely, some public reason accounts might not accept it. Rawlsian accounts seem to restrict the requirement of public justification to just some acts of coercion (say, concerning matters of basic justice or constitutional essentials): if that is the correct interpretation, Rawslians restrict the range of L to a subset of laws. Since my aim here is to show that even our fairly strong Public Justification Principle has extremely modest implications for the status of religious reasons in politics, we need not worry if some public reason views adopt a more restricted principle.

2.2 Pluralism of reasons of members of an idealized public

As stated, almost any political theory would endorse the Public Justification Principle: if the members of P are so specified that they all accept, say, a certain substantive moral theory, then coercive acts justified by that moral theory would also be justified by the Public Justification Principle. If each member of the public accepted the same moral theory M, then of course each member of the public has reason to endorse those acts of coercion mandated by M. The Public Justification Principle would do little or no work. Again, the principle could justify a specific theological view if, say, the members of the public were assumed to have grace, or have had the proper conversion experience. The principle becomes interesting, and not reducible to any specific moral theory or religious view, when the public and its deliberative conditions are so specified that what is a reason to one member of P may not be a reason to others. Under conditions of reasonable pluralism, we cannot suppose that the reasoning of one member of the public is a proxy for everyone else’s reasoning. Consequently, the requirement that every member of P has reason to endorse L is not implied by one member doing so.

If the ‘clarion call’ of public reason liberalism is that coercion must be publicly justified, the problem that motivates the public reason project is the conviction that rational disagreement is the ‘normal result of the exercise of human reason’.² Some philosophers are apt to reject this because they see it as denying the objectivity of reasons: rational persons, they claim, are necessarily tracking the same objective reasons. My aim here is not to answer these objections, but we should remember that the disagreement about reasons takes place among a suitably described public: whether or not this implies a metaphysics of reasons depends on how the public is described. If they are all perfectly rational, with perfect information, and having no time constraints on deliberations, then perhaps rational pluralism plausibly entails a metaphysical doctrine about the plurality of reasons, but that is by no means implied in the generic formulation of the view.

I assume here that included in this reasonable pluralism are religious beliefs: some of the public (P) have religious beliefs while others do not. Some secular liberals argue that fully rational individuals would not have any religious beliefs, while some religiously-inclined philosophers insist that all fully rational individuals would accept at least some religious beliefs. We can set aside this debate: at best it only concerns extreme characterizations of the relevant public (the perfectly rational with full information). Some, of course, go further, and argue that all religious beliefs commit one to clear mistakes, and so on almost any plausible specification of P (the public), members would not reason on the basis of religious considerations. Now to be sure, if one holds a religious belief in a way that that is incompatible with one’s rationally fundamental beliefs about the way to understand the world, and if this is pointed out, and one still maintains the religious belief, then any view (such as public reason liberalism) that appeals to good reasons will question the rationality of such religious beliefs. ...

Table of contents

• Routledge innovations in political theory
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I The moral foundations of multiculturalism
• Part II Secularism and the political claims of religious groups
• Part III Multiculturalism, state sovereignty and imperial past
• Index