Opposing Laws with Religious Reasons
Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: According to public reason liberals, laws, policies, and political institutions need to be justifiable to those who are subject to them.This entails that the reasons given in favor of a political arrangement are normatively relevant for all sufficiently idealized citizens.These reasons are public reasons.Since political deliberation is intimately connected with the resulting law or policy, the view often also incorporates a moral duty for citizens not to rely on nonpublic reasoning in the public political forum.According to virtually all proponents of such deliberative public reason requirements, these demands are symmetrical.1 If there is a moral duty to give public reasons in favor of a law or a policy, those who are opposed to the proposal will always have a corresponding duty to provide public reasons against it.This position has yet to be put to critical scrutiny.In this paper, I reject it.I argue that there is a class of cases where the public-reason-giving requirement should be relaxed for some participants in the public political forum-cases where the public-reason-giving requirements should be asymmetric.A person opposing an "invasive law" is under no obligation to give public reasons.A proponent of the law is.It is morally acceptable to provide only nonpublic reasons against invasive laws, but not in favor of them.To explicate the benefits of this asymmetric view of public reason, I apply it to the public debates around European so-called "burqa bans."Empirical research suggests that some niqab wearers believe that they have a religious obligation to cover their faces.Assuming some degree of noncompliance to the norms of public reason under nonideal circumstances, a subset of these women will not be prepared to give public reasons against the bans.On the symmetric view of public reason, they would be excluded from the public political forum.Those niqab wearers who are willing to give public reasons are susceptible to another cost.If they believe that the religious reasons against banning the niqab are what truly motivates their opposition, they have to "split themselves."They are unable to debate as their full selves when defending their comprehensive practice.I do not intend to offer a comprehensive account of burqa bans or the question of religious clothing.Instead, the niqab case merely serves as a way of making the advantages of the asymmetric view explicit.Further, this article will only briefly address the question of whether public reason liberalism is preferable to perfectionist liberalisms, or non-liberal ways of justifying state power.However, the view presented here incorporates some worries from public-reason sceptics,
Source: Journal of Social Philosophy
DOI: 10.1111/josp.12363
Author: Henrik D. Kugelberg
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,500
OpenAlex ID: W3035494168