Abstract
In part because of the distinct standing of sacred texts religious communities are probably the acid test for the regulatory powers of the liberal state. One might even argue that it is in addressing religious doctrines that the deficiencies of the liberal model are most pronounced. Liberal theorists are often so troubled by religion that they require revisions in religious beliefs as a condition for their access to the conceptual domains of public reason. The unease clouds both interpretive sides of religion. On one side there is a tendency in the harsher liberal views to underestimate the possibilities of styles of reasoning (not values) common to both religion and the secular democratic state. Ronald Thiemann has presented a list of ingredients in the critical reasoning of public discourse that can be shared with religion, including publicity, the intersection of the religious norms of fairness and concern for the vulnerable with secular norms of equality and mutual respect, and the accommodation strategies that can house secular values of tolerance and mutual respect, a conceptual package that conflicts with more sectarian approaches in religion but still count as religious indicators.1 Religion has always had (though not universally) its own critical discourses, represented, for example, in the argumentative styles of Jesuit traditions (which include Aquinas’s proofs of God from observation and argument), and the recent public efforts of religious figures to influence political policies with arguments and evidence, as, for example, in opposition to war, support of social programs for the poor, and so on.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
R.F. Thiemann, Religion and Public Life: A Dilemma for Democracy (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1996), pp. 154–64.
J. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (NY: Free Press, 1995).
Bruce Ackerman, “Why Dialogue?” Journal of Philosophy (January 1989), pp. 5–22. The need for a core morality in political reasoning is asserted (and negotiated) by Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998), pp. 52–3.
Steve Macedo’s “Introduction” in Macedo, ed., Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
H.P. Grice, “Logic and Conversation,” in Speech Acts, edited by P. Cole and J. Morgan (New York: Academic Press, 1975)
D. Davidson and G. Harman, eds., The Logic of Grammar (California: Dickenson, 1975).
Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, pp. 56–7. For an exposition and critique of these (and other) points, see Leif Werner, “Political Liberalism: An Internal Critique,” Ethics 106, No. 1 (October 1995), pp. 32–62. Werner sees the Rawlsian project as two-staged, with justice as fairness comprising the first set of arguments and political liberalism as a presentation of justice as fairness in terms of the reasonable as a way to envelop justice in an overlapping consensus. Also see Onora O’Neil’s distinction between two interpretations of reasonableness that seem to thread through Rawls’s work: the reasonable person offers fair principles of cooperation that others will accept, or others can accept. In “Political Liberalism and Public Reason: A Critical Notice of John Rawls’ Political liberalism,” The Philosophical Review 106, No. 3 (July 1997), pp. 411–28. That these are quite different takes on the reasonable is indicated by the fact that the first implies the second, but not the reverse. “Can” also implies a moral failure on non-acceptance while “will” obviates that possibility. I have been enlightened on these points by a paper by Roald Nashi, “Reasonableness in Rawls’ Political Liberalism” that he wrote for my (spring 2003) graduate seminar on these matters. For a thoughtful and sympathetic treatment of deliberation in politics, more general and complex than the literature on Rawls, see James Bohman, Public Deliberation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
On the exclusionary effects of the Gutmann and Thompson tests, see Stanley Fish’s lucid paper in the Macedo volume, “Mutual Respect as a Device of Exclusion.” The literature in philosophy of science on reliable methods is voluminous, and starts with the famous Alan Musgrave and Imre Lakatos, eds., collection, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge: Volume 4: Proceedings of the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, London, 1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970)
Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: Norton, 1971).
B. Ackerman, We the People: Transformations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2000).
Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 776
R.M. Hare, “The Promising Game,” in The Is-Ought Question: A Collection of Papers on the Central Problems in Moral Philosophy, edited by W.D. Hudson (New York: Macmillan, 1969).
Jon Elster, ed., Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1998)
R. Grant, Hypocrisy and Integrity: Machiavelli, Rousseau, and the Ethics of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
L. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Reprint Edition, October 1988).
Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (NY: Bantam Books, 1995)
Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Mind (New York: Harcourt, 2003).
James Johnson in “Arguing for Deliberation: Some Skeptical Considerations,” in Deliberative Democracy, edited by Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 161–84.
Alan Wolfe, The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Lives (New York: Free Press, 2003)
David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)
John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)
Abdolkarim Soroush, Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
J. Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950).
The evolutionary view of religion is argued prominently by Wilson in Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society. See also the impressive account of religion as a product of natural selection in the magisterial and brilliant and one-sided book by Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking, 2006).
T Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Robert Nozick, Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002)
The thoughts and quotes here are drawn from M. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Steve Macedo, “In Defense of Liberal Public Reason: Are Slavery and Abortion Hard Cases?” The American Journal of Jurisprudence 42 (1997), pp. 1–19.
Copyright information
© 2006 Fred M. Frohock
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Frohock, F.M. (2006). True Colors: Public and Deliberative Reasoning. In: Bounded Divinities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10954-5_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10954-5_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-73755-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-10954-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)