Abstract
This chapter deals with the problem of public justification of the human right to freedom of religion or belief1 in a religiously, philosophically, and culturally division-prone world.
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Reference
The core elements of the modern, internationally recognized human right to freedom of religion or belief are outlined in the Introduction to the present volume.
Michael Freeman, Human Rights: An interdisciplinary approach (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 41–42. Displaying the grounds of moral validity for the particular human right to freedom of religion or belief is, I suggest below, fraught with dilemmas as recalcitrant as is justification of human rights in general.
See chapters 19 through 23 of the present volume. For an insightful discussion of collisions and tensions at the intersection of religious freedom rights and women’s rights see Martha Nussbaum, “The Role of Religion,” chap. 3 in Women and Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 167–240. Nussbaum’s analysis proceeds not in terms of human rights; rather she advocates what amounts to a human rights “proxy”: a duty on all governments to recognize and implement constitutional principles safeguarding specific human capabilities “as a bare minimum of what respect for human dignity requires” (5).
R. Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (Lanham: Rowman Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000).
Most chapters in the present volume deal with complex and often contentious matters relating to the proper demarcation of the human right to freedom of religion or belief.
I explain the conception of a secular society in subsection III.E below. Here I just note that its structure bars societal hegemony of any particular religion, ideology, or Weltanschauung. I use the terms “plural” and “plurality” to indicate the “co-presence of many,” in this context the co-presence of people adhering to many diverging communities and traditions of religion and life stance; the terms “pluralist” and “pluralism” are used to indicate a cognitive or evaluative “stance to plurality.” The plurality/pluralism distinction may sound strange to American ears. The distinction is used by Ian S. Markham, Plurality and Christian Ethics, rev. ed. (New York: Seven Ridges Press, 1999); see the review of Markham by R. J. Neuhaus in First Things 46 (October 1994): 74–88.
The term “overlapping justification” alludes to John Rawls’ doctrine of an “overlapping consensus” about the principles of social justice; see his Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 131–72. Alerted by David Little (“Rethinking Human Rights: Religion, Relativism, and Other Matters,” Journal of Religious Ethics 27 [1999]: 151–57) I prefer the term “overlapping justification” to make clear that what is at stake is justification, not just agreement (a stance shared, I believe, by Rawls most of the time in his theory of social justice). Applying Rawlsian ideas to the challenge of cross-cultural legitimation of universal human rights was proposed at the October 1989 Saskatoon Conference on Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspectives; see Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, ed. Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspectives. A Quest for Consensus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 387–435, at 400. Instead of “overlapping justification” we may, alternatively, speak about “ecumenical justification” or “plural justification.” The term “ecumenical justification” is introduced, with special reference to human rights, by Joseph Chan, “A Confucian Perspective on Human Rights for Contemporary China,” in The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, ed. Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 212–37, at 212. Says Chan, “ecumenical justification... encourages different cultures to justify human rights in their own terms and perspectives¡” I have argued the case for “plural justification” of universal human rights in Tore Lindholm, “Ethical Justification of Universal Rights across Normative Divides,” in Universal Ethics. Perspectives and Proposals from Scandinavian Scholars, ed. G. Bexell and D. E. Andersson (The Hague: Kluwer Law International: 2002), 63–83.
The term “life stance” is chosen to capture nonreligious positions referred to by the term “belief’ in the human rights-locution ”freedom of religion or belief,“ e.g. in UDHR art. 18. Humanism, as presented in the chapter by Gogineni and Gule in this volume, exemplifies a nonreligious life stance: Humanists are organized at national and international levels, offer to members ceremonies of name-giving, civic confirmations, weddings, and funerals, profess a secularist creed and code of conduct, and provide members with a sense of community, in a fashion somewhat similar to that of many religious communities. Of course all human beings, including people not belonging to any religious or life-stance community and people indifferent to matters of religion or life stance, are fully entitled to, and may conceivably heed, protection of their human right to freedom of religion or belief.
A philosopher’s role in the quest for knowledge, Locke argues, may properly be that of a facilitator, in his words, “’tis ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge;” (John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Roger Woolhouse (London: Penguin Books, 1997 [1689]), 11. Plato, of course, leaves little doubt about his answer to the question posed in the Republic: “Inasmuch as philosophers only are able to grasp the eternal and unchangeable, and those who wander in the region of the many and variable are not philosophers, I must ask you which of the two classes should be the rulers of our State?” (Republic 484b).
See Lindholm, “Ethical Justification,” 65–68 for a discussion of the pertinent deliberations of the founding mothers and fathers of universal human rights 1947–1948.
See note 8 above.
The second dilemma presented in section II is related to but not identical with the dilemma of human rights justification described by Freeman, Human Rights, and quoted in the Introduction to this chapter.
See An-Na’im, ed., Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspectives, 22–29 and passim.
See Lindholm, “Ethical Justification.”
See David Litde, “Rethinking Human Rights,” 151–77.
Malcolm Evans, Religious Liberty and International Law in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 6. See also the chapter by Evans in this volume for important materials drawn upon in the present section. For a classical statement, see Jean Jacques Rousseau’s essay on civil religion in The Social Contract, trans. G. D. H. Cole (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1950), 129–33.
An exception among these exceptions was the Indian emperor Ashoka (reign appr. 265 to 238 BCE) who was unique by instituting in his vast multireligious empire religious freedom as a matter of principle¡ªbased, tacitly, on Buddhist doctrine; see below, subsection III.D.
St. Augustine’s dismal interpretation of the Gospel According to Luke 14:23, (“... and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled”) was exploited by mainstream Christian churches for fourteen centuries to justify the use of political power against heretics and infidels. See St. Augustine, Treatise Concerning the Correction of the Donatists, chap. 6, sec. 24. Significant portions of this text are available at the following site: <http://www.ccel.org/fathers/NPNF104/augustine/bkcorrection/correction.html> (visited 23.11.02). For St. Augustine and the Donatists, see Brian Tierney, “Religious Rights: A Historical Perspective,” in Religious Liberty in Western Thought, ed. N. B. Reynolds and W. C. Durham, Jr. (Atlanta: Scholar Press for Emory University, 1996), 33.
Against infidels: “On November 25, 1095, at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II summoned the First Crusade.... The Pope urged the knights of Europe to stop fighting each other and to make common cause against the enemies of God. The Turks, he cried, are ‘an accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God, a generation, forsooth, which has neither directed its heart not entrusted its spirit to God.’ Killing these godless monsters was an holy act: it was a Christian duty to ‘exterminate this vile race from our lands’” (Karen Armstrong, Holy War. The Crusades and their Impact on Today’s World [New York: Doubleday/ Anchor Books, 1992], 3). Armstrong quotes texts written shortly after the “success” of the First Crusade.
Against heretics: “We excommunicate and anathematize every heresy that raises against the holy, orthodox and Catholic faith which we have above explained; condemning all heretics under whatever names they may be known, for while they have different faces they are nevertheless bound to each other by their tails, since in all of them vanity is a common element. Those condemned, being handed over to the secular rulers of their bailiffs, let them be abandoned, to be punished with due justice, clerics being first degraded from their orders. As to the property of the condemned, if they are laymen, let it be confiscated; if clerics, let it be applied to the churches from which they received revenues.... Secular authorities, whatever office they may hold, shall be admonished and induced and if necessary compelled by ecclesiastical censure, that as they wish to be esteemed and numbered among the faithful, so for the defense of the faith they ought publicly to take an oath that they will strive in good faith and to the best of their ability to exterminate in the territories subject to their jurisdiction all heretics pointed out by the Church; so that whenever anyone shall have assumed authority, whether spiritual or temporal, let him be bound to confirm this decree by oath.” From Canon 3 of Decree of the Fourth Lateran Council of the Roman Catholic Church, 1215. Text at <http:// www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/lateran4.html> (visited 23.11.02).
The secularized character of post-Westphalian international society is spelled out in subsection III.C below.
See subsection III.B below.
On the political significance of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes see Martin Kriele, Einfiihrung in die Staatslehre. Diegeschichtlichen Legitimationsgrundlagen des demokratischen Verfassungstaates, 5th ed. (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994), 48–55.
A good survey and general assessment of intellectual traditions leading up to the non-establishment clause in the First Amendment to the US Constitution is Noah Feldman, “The Intellectual Origins of the Establishment Clause,” N.T. U. Law Rev. 77 (2002): 346–428. Abiding dilemmas of an American “republic under God,” bound both to non-establishment of religion and its free exercise, are instructively analyzed by Ronald F. Thiemann, Religion in Public Life: A Dilemma for Democracy (Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1996).
See the chapter by Evans in this volume. For an extended treatment, see Malcolm Evans, Religious Liberty and International Law in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chapters 2 through 9.
Literally: “whose the region (or realm), his the religion.” This oft-quoted formula applied to early modern political rulers (“princes”) seems to originate with Joseph Stephani, a Lutheran ecclesiastic jurist writing in the 1590s. The political model goes back to the 1555 Peace of Augsburg and is older than the famous formula. See Joseph Leclerc, “Die Religionsfreiheit im Lauf der Geschichte” [Freedom of Religion in the Course of History], Concilium 2 (1966): 572. This German language issue of Concilium has several key articles about the positions of different religions on religious freedom. The journal is also published in English; the corresponding issue in English is Concilium 18 (1966). It seems appropriate that a Lutheran is the source of the religio-political adage cuius regio, eius religio, since Lutherans in the 1530s were overwhelmed by political and military circumstances to stomach the inception of what turned out to be almost five hundred years of Lutheran “landesherrliche Kirchenregiment” (“church rule by the lord of the land”). Claiming the cuius regio-, eius religio model to be a form of religious freedom may well be contested. It remained, well into the twentieth century, in some cases a model of religious intolerance in the land of the “Landesherr.” Lutheranism is still the established state religion in Denmark and in Norway. See the chapters by Minnerath, and by Eidsvâg, Lindholm, and Sveen in this volume.
John Witte, Jr., “Introduction,” in Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective: Religious Perspectives, ed. John Witte, Jr. and Johan D. van der Vyver (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1996), xxxiii.
See, again, the chapter by Evans in this volume.
The chapter by Evans in this volume, text after footnote 78. Numbers in brackets are added.
Writing from a different perspective, Brad S. Gregory notes: “It would be an exaggeration to say that unresolved religious disagreement caused the Enlightenment, the rise of modern science and philosophy, the early modern renaissance of skepticism, and the birth of modern relativism. Yet its important influence on all these major trajectories in modern thought is clear. Moreover, the clash of religious absolutisms in early modern Christianity was fertile soil for the growth of secular political thought and secular political institutions. Such was the logical extension of the politique Views articulated in the sixteenth century, as for example during the French Wars of Religion. Because the prospects for peaceful coexistence among Christians were tenuous at best, and none of the parties wouldcapitulate to the others, only nonreligious values could serve as the basis of stable social and political life” (Salvation at Stake. Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe [Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999], 348–49 [emphasis added]). The present chapter argues that political secularization was pioneered, as it were, by early modern international relations and was subsequently adopted domestically in the political life of a growing number of countries as a part of their in-depth structural transformations into modern secular societies. See subsection III.E below, also for a discussion of Wolfhart Pannenberg’s indictment of modern secularist public culture. Pannenberg’s position is close to the view Gregory labels “an exaggeration.”
I have borrowed this quote from Evans; see note 28 in the chapter by Evans in this volume.
We may assume that major proponents of secularized international politics, from Alberico Gentili and Hugo Grotius and onwards for a long time, were religious people. What matters here is the secular and nonreligious character of their political arguments.
See sections II to IV of the chapter by Evans in this volume.
Ashoka’s Edicts are quoted mainly after the following sources: Les Inscriptions d’Asoka, traduites et comment¨¦es par Jules Bloch (Professeur au Coll¨¨ge de France) (Paris: Soci¨¦t¨¦ d’Edition “Les Belles Lettres,” Collection Emile Senart, 1950); The Edicts of King Ashoka; An English rendering by Ven S. Dhammika (Kandy [Sri Lanka]: The Wheel Publication No. 386/387,1993). The latter is among the translations easily found on the internet. Translations are in part somewhat uncertain, and I have taken the liberty of combining different translations. I should add here that research on Ashoka is very much in process and that interpretations of his politics on religion diverge.
Balthasar Hubmaier, Schriften (Hrsg. Gunnar Westin u. Torsten Bergsten) (Giitersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1962), 59–66; translation: H. Wayne Pipkin and John H. Yoder, eds., Balthasar Hubmaier, Theologian of Anabaptism (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1989), 58–66.
Experts are divided on whether Hubmaier in fact advocated principled universal religious freedom on Biblical grounds, which is the position attributed to him in the text.
David Litde in David Litde, John Kelsay, and Abdulaziz A. Sachedina, Human Rights and Conflict of Cultures: Western and Islamic Perspectives on Religious Liberty (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), 21.
Litde, Kelsay, and Sachedina, Human Rights and Conflict of Cultures 23.
Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution... (Providence, R.I.: Publications of the Narragansett Club, 1867), 3:3–4.
Feldman, eager to demonstrate the centrality of the Lockean liberty of conscience doctrine for the non- establishment clause in the US Constitution, tardy dismisses Roger Williams’ role: “Roger Williams’ views were not invoked at the Framing” (“The Intellectual Origins of the Establishment Clause,” 427). Feldman does not address Williams’ possible influence on the (much more restrictive) religious freedom doctrine of Locke. I briefly discuss Locke’s doctrine in section IV.
On Joseph Smith and the Mormon tradition, see Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Champaign-Urbana, 111.: University of Illinois Press, 1987).
Quoted from W. Cole Durham, Jr., The Doctrine of Religious Freedom (Provo, Utah: J. Reuben Clark Law School, Clark Memorandum, 2001), 12; this fine small study has interesting materials and gives further references about the LDS doctrine on religious and life-stance freedom.
Durham, The Doctrine of Religious Freedom, 4; emphasis added.
See Peter L. Berger, ed, The Desecularization of the World. Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Washington D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999).
The usage of the terms by religious or life-stance communities may depart from the range of meanings intimated in the text. E.g., in Roman Catholic usage “secularization” refers to church-authorized permissions given to “religious” (members of religious orders) to live outside the cloister and their order (hence, in the “saeculum”), and “secularism” refers to the modernist doctrine that man should be guided solely by considerations derived from the present life¡ªa doctrine held to be fundamentally erroneous by the Church and embraced by the nonreligious (e.g., by Humanists, see the chapter by Gogineni and Gule in this volume). Also compare the presentation ofWolfhart Pannenberg’s understanding of “secularism,” below.
Helge Hoibraaten, “Secular Society: An Attempt at Initiation,” in Islamic Law Reform and Human Rights, ed. Tore Lindholm and Kari Vogt (Oslo: Nordic Human Rights Publications, 1993), 231–57. Hoibraaten’s essay is replete with references to pertinent scholarly contributions.
Hoibraaten, “Secular Society,” 232.
The structural features of secular society mentioned in the text so far are referred to in sociological terms by saying that modern society is functionally differentiated into autonomous “primary subsystems”: See Niklas Luhmann, The Differentiation of Society, trans. Stephen Holmes and Charles Larmore (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 229–54 and passim.
Hoibraaten, “Secular Society,” 239.
Hoibraaten, “Secular Society,” 234.
Jos¨¦ Casanova, Public Religion in the Modern World (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 19 (emphasis added). Casanova’s book provides an excellent but critical outiine of the sociological theory of secularization (17–39 and passim).
Hoibraaten, “Secular Society,” 244¡ª45. Hoibraaten’s inventory is even more extensive but the gist should be clear enough.
There is no denying the normative implications of the conception of a secular society set forth in this section. Nour Kirabaev, at the time head of the Department of Philosophy at the Russian People’s Friendship University in Moscow, in 1992 assessed the political system of the Soviet Union saying, “A socialist state is not a secular state in the same way as a democratic state. It is a sacred state. It cannot be tolerant and cannot recognize real religious freedom. It is very similar to an authoritarian theocratic state” (Lindholm and Vogt, eds., Islamic Law Reform, 220). Of course, antireligious state ideologies are not immune against fundamentalist excesses, be they rationalist, laicist, “scientific,” or fascist.
Several chapters of the present volume demonstrate this dependence to boot.
Of course, a modern state may protect religious liberty and be authentically Islamic in the sense that its political legitimacy is widely accepted on Islamic grounds by Muslims. The ideology of “Islamic” state censured in the text advocates religious discrimination by the state drawing legitimacy from a particular, coercively imposed version of Islamic doctrine. An early Islamic rejection of the ideology of an “Islamic” state is Abdelwahab El-Affendi, Who Needs an Islamic State? (London: Grey Seal Books, 1991). The author concludes, “If the foregoing discussion has any validity, then one has to infer that the concept of an Islamic State must be completely abandoned if sanity is to return to Muslim political discourse. One should rather speak about a state for the Muslims, an Islamic political community” (93).
This norm is of course enunciated in The Holy Koran, sura 2, aya 256.
Abdullahi An-Na’im, “Synergy and Interdependence of Religion, Human Rights and Secularism,” Poly log: Forum for Intercultural Philosophizing (2001), visited at <http://wwwpolylog.Org/tehyem/2/fes7-en.htm>; Tore Lindholm, “Menneskerettigheter og religioner: konflikt eller gjensidig st0tte?” [Human rights and religions: Conflict or mutual reinforcement?] Amnesty Nytt (Oslo: Amnesty International Norway, Sept. 1998)
My summary account borrows heavily from Casanova, Public Religion, 11–66, concentrated at 17–20.
This is, of course, the analysis presented earlier on in this section, referring to Luhmann, The Differentiation of Society Hoibraaten, “Secular Society,” and Casanova, Public Religion.
Peter L. Berger, ¨¦d., The Desecularization of the World. Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Washington D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999), 2–3
The general sociological argument is corroborated by Casanovas’ case studies of religious structural transformation in the second half of the twentieth century in Spain, Poland, Brazil, and the United States, focusing on Catholicism in all four countries and including also Evangelical Protestantism in the US. See Casanova, Public Religion.
Worldwide but not everywhere: some significant exceptions include the academic faculty of social science and humanities departments at elite universities in the US and the populations of European countries endowed with tenacious state church arrangements. See Berger, ed, The Desecularization of the World, 9–10.
Casanova, Public Religion. Obviously, “secularization theory proper” implies the emergence of secular society as defined in this subsection but not the rise of various forms of cultural secularism.
Wolfhart Pannenberg, “How to Think About Secularism,” First Things 64 (1996): 27–32.
Pannenberg, “How to Think About Secularism,” 27
Pannenberg, “How to Think About Secularism,” 28
Pannenberg, “How to Think About Secularism,” 28, emphasis added, except for “seculamm.”
Pannenberg, “How to Think About Secularism,” 30, emphasis added.
Pannenberg, “How to Think About Secularism,” 29, emphasis added.
See note 60 above and subsection III.F below.
Steve Bruce, Politics and Religion (Cambridge: Polity, 2003) brings a wealth of well-documented and often fascinating facts under each of these headings. He concludes his book with a chapter on “Explanations,” which are not all borne out by facts, such as, “[religions] cannot treat all people as equal irrespective of their religion” (245) or, “almost every state in which Muslims are in a large majority is theocratic” (241). How about Muslims in Indonesia? Or in Turkey? For the case of Indonesia, see Robert W. Hefner, Civil Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); for Turkey see Binnaz Toprak, “Islam and the Secular State in Turkey,” in Turkey: Political, Social and Economic Challenges in the 1990s, ed. C. Balim et al. (London: E. J. Brill, 1995)
Casanova, Public Religion, Berger, ¨¦d., The Desecularization of the World, and Torkel Brekke, Gud i norsk politikk. Religion og politisk makt [God in Norwegian politics. Religion and political power] (Oslo: Pax Forlag, 2002).
See section II, above.
W. Cole Durham, Jr., “Perspectives on Religious Liberty: A Comparative Framework,” in Religious Human Rights in Perspective. Legal Perspectives, ed. Johan van der Vyver and John Witte, Jr. (The Hague: Martin Nijhoff, 1996), 1–44, at 7–8
John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, edited by John Horton and Susan Mendus (London and New York: Roudedge, 1991), 16–17. The statement is interesting among other reasons because Locke as a matter of course introduces two moral tribunals for assessing toleration: both the revealed Gospel of Jesus Christ and the genuine reason of mankind, the latter implying a capacity for moral reason shared by all men.
See Stephen Holmes, Passions and Constraint. On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 202–35.
Of course, societal privatization and marginalization of religion, as well as epistemic skepticism and relativism about religious truth claims, have been endorsed as antidotes in their own right against malicious religious strife.
Questions about a laicist (in contrast to a secular) state are addressed in chapters 18, 20, and 26 of this volume.
The chapter by Leonard Swidler in this volume touches on these matters. An insightful overview of contemporary intra- and interreligious discourse about salvific exclusivism/inclusivism/pluralism, from the point of view of a Christian, is Kate McCarthy, “Reckoning with Religious Difference: Models of Interreligious Moral Dialogue,” in Explorations in Global Ethics. Comparative Religious Ethics and Interreligious Dialogue, ed. Sumner B. Twiss and Bruce Grelle (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 73–117.
This paragraph is a severely shortened version of Lindholm, “Ethical Justification,” 65–68. The public moral grounds of universally binding rights, elaborated in 1947–1948 by UN Human Rights bodies, I have earlier referred to as “a justificatory prototheory of human rights” (An-Na’im, ed., Human Rights in Cross- Cultural Perspectives, 395–97). Incidentally, knowledge of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights its content, intellectual background, and political context is often surprisingly shallow. A careful study of the text in its context of origin is recommended. Guidance may be found in Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Origins, Drafting, and Intent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Gudmundur Alfredsson and Asbjorn Eide, eds., The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: A Common Standard of Achievement (The Hague: Martin Nijhoff, 1999); Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001).
The content of the two main premises is drawn from the UDHR. Premise PI is derived from Article 1 and Article 29, and premise P2 comes from the Preamble of the UDHR and from preparatory deliberations in various UN organs at the time the UDHR was being drafted. The argument of the founders is a straightforward practical syllogism. To make the structure of the argument explicit the two premises and the conclusion would have to be put in the first person plural, giving voice to the reasoning of governments as representatives of their peoples, as in the Charter of the United Nations: “We the Peoples of the United Nations hold PI and P2 and we therefore agree on and resolve to establish...” Of course, the argument is still elliptical, or incomplete; in particular, the globally prevailing social circumstances of human rights are not spelled out.
International humans rights instruments use the words “freedom” and “dignity” in various configurations, always with normative intent, as the source from which human rights derive. In what follows I shall not address how the notions of dignity and freedom are conceptually linked. I shall stick to the term “inherent dignity.” Elucidating the provenience and providing in-depth interpretation of the public doctrine of inherent human dignity is a task well beyond the present chapter. For a succinct and competent overview of the historical trajectory of the doctrine see Hubert Cancik, “’Dignity of Man’ and ‘Persona’ in Stoic Anthropology: Some Remarks on Cicero, De officis I 105–107,” in The Concept of Human Dignity in Human Rights Discourse, ed. David Kretzmer and Eckart Klein (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2002), 19–39. Suffice it to say here that attempts at doctrinal monopolization or “possessive embrace” of the doctrine of inherent dignity, in the name of one’s own religion or life stance, should be turned down politely and firmly, in the spirit of Ashoka’s dictum, “Whoever praises his own religion, due to excessive attachment, and denigrates that of others with the thought ‘Let me glorify my own religion,’ in reality inflicts the severest injury on his own religion.”
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in its second preambular article reads, “Recognizing that these rights derive from the inherent dignity of the human person,¡” Similar “justifcatory” language recurs throughout international human rights documents.
In this and the next four paragraphs I paraphrase freely from Michael J. Perry, The Idea of Human Rights. Four Inquiries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), supplemented by ideas borrowed from Robert Nozick, Maurice Cranston, and James Nickel.
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), ix.
In a secular society, concern with human rights is not exclusively a political or juridical affair, but a matter potentially engaged in by all in the public square where moral, cultural, and religious, professional and lay inputs are crucial for overall legitimacy of outcomes.
For the structure and principled incompleteness of the public argument for human rights supplied by the founders, see footnote 81 above.
See note 7 above.
See Section III above.[1] The story has been told many times and I have space only for a very brief version. An excellent overview with references is Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred, 42–48
Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred, 43
From sections 14 and 15 of Mimri vos, Encyclical of Pope Gregory XVI, promulgated on 15 August 1832 <http://wwwewtn.com/library/encyc/gl6mirar.htm> (site visited 06.11.03).
Pope John XXIII, knowing he would very soon die, wrote Pacem in terris partly in light of the ineluctable necessity, in his view, of promoting suitable normative foundations for peaceful coexistence in the aftermath of the Cuba crisis. But in underwriting modern human rights as defined by the Universal Declaration the Holy Father could also know that “I was there”: as Papal Nuncio to Paris (1943–1952) Monsignor Roncalli took part in the consultations of an advisory group to Ren¨¦ Cassin, a prominent and influential French member of the working group of the UN Commission on Human Rights that drafted the Universal Declaration, 1946–1948.
I See John Courtney Murray, “Arguments for the Human Rights to Religious Freedom,” chap. 4 in Religious Liberty: Catholic Struggles with Pluralism, by John C. Murray, edited by J. Leon Hooper, S.J. (Lousiville, Ky.: Westminster/Jon Knox Press, 1993).
I highly recommend this posthumously published book to readers who want to go deeply into the impressive intellectual edifice of Catholic doctrine and argument about religious freedom and the doctrine of inherent human dignity. Murray brought to the Catholic world an innovative and penetrating understanding of the American experiment in religious freedom. A large collection of Vatican II documents with a commentary can be found in Joseph Gremillion, ed, The Gospel of Peace and Justice. Catholic Social Teaching Since Pope John (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1976).
From Editor’s introduction to Murray “Arguments for the Human Right to Religious Freedom.”
Joseph Chan, “A Confucian Perspective on Human Rights for Contemporary China,” in The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, ed. Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 212–40; see also: Tommy Flakk, Human Rights the Confucian Way. Towards International Consensus on Human Rights From Within Cultural Traditions (Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, 2003). The story about Professor P. C. Chang, ren, and Article 1 of the Univeral Declaration is reported in The Universal Declaration, ed. Alfredsson and Eide, 43–44.
Parliament of the World’s Religions, A Global Ethic: The Declaration of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, Hans Kiing and Karl - Josef Kuschel, eds. (London: SCM Press, 1993), 7.
For a sophisticated and well-argued case for interfaith dialogue, see the chapter by Leonard Swidler in this volume.
Paul J. Griffiths, “Why We Need Religious Polemics,” First Things A4 (June/July 1994): 31–37.[1]
Ibid, (emphasis added).
For interesting findings and arguments see Thomas Risse et al., eds., The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999). Also see the chapter by Elizabeth Sewell in this volume.
See the chapter by Eidsvag, Lindholm, and Sveen in this volume.
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Lindholm, T. (2004). Philosophical and Religious Justifications of Freedom of Religion or Belief. In: Lindholm, T., Durham, W.C., Tahzib-Lie, B.G., Sewell, E.A., Larsen, L. (eds) Facilitating Freedom of Religion or Belief: A Deskbook. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-5616-7_2
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