Premium
Toleration after Babel: God‐Talk and the Politics of Reasonableness
Author(s) -
Casson Douglas
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
politics and policy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.259
H-Index - 23
eISSN - 1747-1346
pISSN - 1555-5623
DOI - 10.1111/j.1747-1346.2004.tb00192.x
Subject(s) - toleration , doctrine , politics , appeal , public reason , deliberation , duty , law , political philosophy , law and economics , epistemology , sociology , philosophy , political science , environmental ethics , democracy
The current debate over the place of religious claims in public discourse has, to a certain extent, become a battle over “reasonableness.” In the wake of the influential work of John Rawls, several prominent political theorists have argued that citizens have a moral duty to limit their political deliberation to a particular set of propositions that can be recognized as reasonable, while critics respond that such a limitation is not only impracticable, it is exclusionary. In this essay I return to Locke's A Letter Concerning Toleration and Kant's Conflict of the Faculties in order to show that the continuing struggle over the place of religion in contemporary liberal society is not simply the result of a failure to apply a liberal doctrine with the proper rigor and precision. It is the inevitable consequence of the enduring presence of moral disagreement that an appeal to doctrine can neither transcend nor dispel.