Volume 20, Number 3
November 2021
ARTICLE

Religious Reasoning in the Liberal Public from the Second-Personal Perspective: A Defense of an Inclusivist Model of Public Reason Liberalism

Volume 20, Number 3, November 2021, Pages 248–284
https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v20i3.1127
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Abstract

There is a constant dissent between exclusivist public reason liberals and their inclusivist religious critics concerning the question whether religious arguments can figure into the public justification of state action. Firstly, I claim that the stability of this dissent is best explained as a conflict between an exclusivist third-personal account of public justification which demands restraint, and an inclusivist first-personal account which rejects restraint. Secondly, I argue that both conceptions are deficient because they cannot accommodate the valid intuitions of their opponents. They either imply a violation of the integrity of religious citizens or they give room for cases where a religious majority can impose a political norm on a minority without having given this minority a reason to comply with the norm. Finally, I defend an inclusivist model of public reason liberalism which relies on a second-personal conception of public justification. I claim that this model breaks the impasse in favor of inclusivism because religious arguments can play a role in public justification, but they can never justify state action on their own in a plural society. Thus, the problematic cases that motivate exclusivism are excluded without having introduced a principle of restraint which violates the religious integrity of citizens.
Copyright © 2021 Patrick Zoll
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
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