Reply to Quong, Patten, Miller and Waldron
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Reply to Quong, Patten, Miller and Waldron Cécile Laborde1
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This is a reply to four critics of my book Liberalism’s Religion: Jonathan Quong, Alan Patten, David Miller and Jeremy Waldron, whose essays have been published in a Special Issue of Criminal Law and Philosophy. Keywords Liberalism · Public reason · Exemptions · Establishment · Religion and politics I am grateful for this opportunity to discuss Liberalism’s Religion with the prominent political theorists assembled in this Special Issue. Jonathan Quong and Alan Patten offer detailed critical engagement with my theory of state legitimacy and religious exemptions. Each defends a version of liberalism where one notion (neutrality, public justification, or fairness) can do most of the work; whereas I argue in Liberalism’s Religion that such unitary theories are too vague and abstract to deliver practical ethical guidelines on their own. I defend a more fine-grained, more structured and more pluralist liberal political theory. David Miller and Jeremy Waldron, for their part, develop or comment on some central claims of Liberalism’s Religion. Both encourage me, in different ways, to reflect on the deeper compatibility between liberalism and religion. In what follows, I respond to my critics (Quong and Patten) at length, before raising some questions for Miller and Waldron.
I am grateful to Massimo Renzo for suggesting and coordinating this Special Issue of Criminal Law and Philosophy. Thanks to Henrik Kugelberg for useful comments on a draft version of this text. * Cécile Laborde [email protected] 1
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Criminal Law and Philosophy
1 Response to Jonathan Quong Jon Quong is a generous and acute reader, and his penetrating work on political liberalism has provided a constant source of inspiration for mine. His incisive remarks invite me to clarify my argument at crucial points. Let me start, first, with the general theoretical framework of Liberalism’s Religion. One of the key arguments I develop is that a full account of liberal legitimacy must rely on a disaggregated account of religion. The popular liberal idea of the neutrality of the state towards religion, for example, is grounded in three distinct ideals. Roughly, the state should not endorse any idea about the good—secular or religious—that (1) infringes personal ethics, (2) entrenches social vulnerability or (3) violates public reason. It is only when (and insofar as) religious conceptions are comprehensive, divisive and inaccessible that they should not be invoked by the state. Quong rightly notes that if one holds, instead, a unitary account of legitimacy, ethical salience can be assessed from a single vantage point: in his case, the extent to which specific conceptions can ground public reasons. Liberalism’s Religion aimed precisely to demonstrate the limits of such unitary accounts. Because they are pitched at a high level of generality, they cannot do sufficient normative work without the intr
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