The Moral Foundations of Today’s Democracies: Rationality, Faith, and Realism in Politics

Abstract

The concept of democracy is usually taken to be a political concept, whereas fundamentalism has a religious ring. The first has a positive moral meaning, which cannot be said about the sec-ond, for fundamentalism has a morally suspicious connotation. If it is true, then democracy must be in opposition to fundamentalism in a moral sense. If democracy is good, and fundamentalism is bad, then we would have to put forth two questions: first, are these two terms comparable on moral grounds at all, and second, if they are, is it really tenable that these two terms, on moral basis, are irreconcilable. Making things more controversial, there is enough evidence to call political fanaticism a correlate with religious fundamentalism. Whatever parallels or conclusions we arrive at, the more fundamental problem is the relationship between rationality and faith. Democracy is purely based on a rational justification, that is, even its morality should have an epistemological justification, therefore it has been in a controversial position: as any regime, it also badly needs a moral foundation; however, it declares that fundamentalism of any sort, especially religious, is against the moral grounding of democracy, since it is allied with the idea of tolerance, which allows, in principle, any number of views to be made public and viable.