Abstract
This paper discusses Cécile Laborde’s book, Liberalism’s Religion. First, I pose some questions about how Laborde’s central proposal—disaggregating religion—is meant to solve the two most serious challenges that she argues confront existing liberal egalitarian theories. Second, I respond to some of the objections Laborde presses against my conception of political liberalism. Third, I argue that Laborde is mistaken in adopting accessibility as the appropriate standard for reasons within public justification. Finally, I suggest that Laborde’s view is, in the end, too accommodating to perfectionism in politics. Her view allows laws and public policies to promote particular religions or controversial conceptions of the good life when certain conditions are met, but this, I argue, is inconsistent with the foundational ideals of freedom and equality.
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Notes
Cécile Laborde, Liberalism’s Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) xiii, 347–350.
Jonathan Quong, Liberalism Without Perfection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), Chapter 7.
See, for example, Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1 (1971), 47–66; or Samuel Freeman, Justice and the Social Contract: Essays on Rawlsian Political Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 242–252. For a more critical view, see Jeremy Williams, “Public Reason and Prenatal Moral Status,” The Journal of Ethics 19 (2015), 23–52.
Some—though not all—of the arguments for animal rights that Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka advance are similarly, I believe, consistent with the requirements of public reason. See Donaldson and Kymlicka, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
See, for example, Rawls’s discussion of medical and biological knowledge as political values in Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 245.
For more on the essential role of testimony within public reason, see Sean Donahue, “Public Justification and the Veil of Testimony” (unpublished).
Acknowledgement
I am very grateful to Rebecca Stone for comments and suggestions.
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Quong, J. On Laborde’s Liberalism. Criminal Law, Philosophy 15, 47–59 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-019-09492-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-019-09492-x