Liberal societies conventionally treat religion as unique under the law, requiring both special protection and special containment. But recently this idea that religion requires a legal exception has come under fire from those who argue that religion is no different from any other conception of the good, and the state should treat all such conceptions according to principles of neutrality and equal liberty. Cécile Laborde agrees with much of this liberal egalitarian critique, but she argues that a simple analogy between (...) the good and religion misrepresents the complex relationships among religion, law, and the state. Religion serves as more than a statement of belief about what is true, or a code of moral and ethical conduct. It also refers to comprehensive ways of life, political theories of justice, modes of voluntary association, and vulnerable collective identities. Disaggregating religion into its various dimensions, as Laborde does, has two clear advantages. First, it shows greater respect for ethical and social pluralism by ensuring that whatever treatment religion receives from the law, it receives because of features that it shares with nonreligious beliefs, conceptions, and identities. Second, it dispenses with the Western, Christian-inflected conception of religion that liberal political theory relies on, especially in dealing with the issue of separation between religion and state. As a result, Liberalism's Religion offers a novel answer to the question: Can Western theories of secularism and religion be applied more universally in non-Western societies?--. (shrink)

The republican tradition seems to have a blind spot about global justice. It has had little to say about pressing international issues such as world poverty or global inequalities. According to the old, if apocryphal, adage: extra rempublicam nulla justitia. Some may doubt that distributive justice is the primary virtue of republican institutions; and at any rate most would agree that republican values have traditionally been realized in the polis not in the cosmopolis. The article sketches a republican account of (...) global non-domination which suggests that duties of distributive justice are not bounded to the institutions of a single society. In particular, it argues that republicans have good reasons to seek to curb those global inequalities which underpin what I call capability-denying domination. (shrink)

Should religion be singled out in the law? This Article evaluates two influential theories of freedom of religion in political theory, before introducing an alternative one. The first approach, the Substitution approach, argues that freedom of religion can be adequately expressed by a substitute category: typically, freedom of conscience. The second, the Proxy approach, argues that the notion of religion should be upheld in the law, albeit as a proxy for a range of different goods. After showing that neither approach (...) adequately meets crucial desiderata for an inclusive theory of religious freedom, the Article sets out the Disaggregation approach and defends against the alternatives. (shrink)

Egalitarian theories of religious freedom deny that religion is entitled to special treatment in law above and beyond that granted to comparable beliefs and practices. The most detailed and influential defense of such an approach is Christopher Eisgruber and Lawrence Sager's Religious Freedom and the Constitution (2007). In this essay I develop, elucidate, and show the limits of the strategy adopted by Eisgruber and Sager. The strategy requires that religion be analogized with other beliefs and practices according to a robust (...) metric of comparison. I argue that Eisgruber and Sager fail to develop a consistent and coherent metric and I further suggest that this failure is symptomatic of the broader difficulty encountered by liberal theory in fitting the concept of religious freedom into a broadly egalitarian framework. (shrink)

In Liberalism's Religion, I analyse the specific conception of religion that liberalism relies upon. I argue that the concept of religion should be disaggregated into its normatively salient features. When deciding whether to avert undue impingements on religious observances, or to avoid any untoward support of such observances, liberal states should not deal with ‘religion’ as such but, rather, with relevant dimensions of religious phenomena. States should avoid religious entanglement when ‘religion’ is epistemically inaccessible, socially divisive and/or comprehensive in scope. (...) In turn, states should show special deference to religious observances insofar as they exhibit what I call integrity – whether personal or collective. The upshot of this interpretive strategy is that liberal law need not recognise religion as such. As a result, there are gaps between the liberal construal of disaggregated religion and the lived experience of religion as a uniquely integrated experience. Are these gaps morally regrettable? Are they unjust? (shrink)

In Why Tolerate Religion?, Brian Leiter argues against the special legal status of religion, claiming that religion should not be the only ground for exemptions to the law and that this form of protection should be, in principle, available for the claims of secular conscience as well. However, in the last chapter of his book, he objects to a universal regime of exemptions for both religious and secular claims of conscience, highlighting the practical and moral flaws associated with it. We (...) believe that Leiter identifies a genuine and important contemporary legal and philosophical problem. We find much to admire in his reasoning. However, we raise questions about two claims that are crucial for his argument. The first claim is that it is not religion as such, but conscience that deserves toleration and respect. The second claim is that respect for religion and conscience demands ‘principled toleration’ but does not entail stronger policies of legal exemptions. Against the first claim, we argue that Leiter does not successfully distinguish religious belief from secular conscience and morality; and he does not explain why secular conscience deserves respect. Against the second claim, we argue that the most promising theories of legal exemptions are not classical theories of liberal toleration. (shrink)

In this article, I aim to do two things. I offer an assessment of religious establishment according to liberal standards. I then ask how this analysis bears on Nigel Biggar’s defence of Anglican establishment. I argue that only some features of Anglican establishment are compatible with the liberal standard of what I call minimal secularism.

The study of the reception of Rawls in Europe provides some insights into the persistence or erosion of national and European traditions of political thought since the 1970s. It notably allows us to test the relevance of the divide between `analytical' and `Continental' philosophy, and to measure the impact on political thought of the `liberal' turn of the 1980s. Reception should be seen not a process of absorption but as one of dialogue. The reception of Rawls can be approached along (...) six axes of analysis: the themes, politics, areas, channels, temporality and geography of reception. (shrink)

In Why Tolerate Religion?, Brian Leiter argues against the special legal status of religion, claiming that religion should not be the only ground for exemptions to the law and that this form of protection should be, in principle, available for the claims of secular conscience as well. However, in the last chapter of his book, he objects to a universal regime of exemptions for both religious and secular claims of conscience, highlighting the practical and moral flaws associated with it. We (...) believe that Leiter identifies a genuine and important contemporary legal and philosophical problem. We find much to admire in his reasoning. However, we raise questions about two claims that are crucial for his argument. The first claim is that it is not religion as such, but conscience that deserves toleration and respect. The second claim is that respect for religion and conscience demands ‘principled toleration’ but does not entail stronger policies of legal exemptions. Against the first claim, we argue that Leiter does not successfully distinguish religious belief from secular conscience and morality; and he does not explain why secular conscience deserves respect. Against the second claim, we argue that the most promising theories of legal exemptions are not classical theories of liberal toleration. (shrink)

1. La philosophie politique contemporaine : en français et en anglais François Boucher (FB) : Votre travail semble habité par une volonté d'établir des ponts entre la pensée politique française et anglo-américaine. Cette volonté est déjà visible dans votre ouvrage de 2000, Pluralist Thought and the State in Britain and France (1900-1925), qui compare les penseurs pluralistes du début XXe en France et en Angleterre. Elle est également au cœur de Critical Republicanism, The Hijab Controversy an...

The contributors to this Special Issue all suggest that Christianity is compatible with political liberalism. In this paper, I first illuminate the grounds of this compatibility. I then focus on one distinctive—yet unexplored—premise of the compatibility argument. This is the thought that religious and secular reasons are essentially on a par, in terms of their contribution to public reasoning. I critically examine Christopher Eberle’s claim that, as their epistemological status is equivalent, both secular and religious reasons may play a decisive (...) role in justifying coercion-related state policies, including in contexts of war. (shrink)

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.

Recent decades have seen a dramatic transformation in the mode of governing, with government increasingly outsourced to a network of private actors, spanning education, prisons, regulation, arbitration, the military, and access to healthcare and welfare. Chiara Cordelli’s The Privatized State probes the ethical and philosophical questions raised by this transformation, and develops a distinctive account of the wrong of privatization: that a privatized government cannot be a legitimate government. In so doing, Cordelli engages and advances not only pressing questions about (...) privatization, but also broader questions about public administration, political representation, democratic authority, and neorepublicanism. This symposium brings together scholars for a wide-ranging discussion of this transformation in governance and the deep and challenging questions it raises. (shrink)