Abstract

I will argue that there is a better position which is more religiously inclusive than "political liberalism" as conceived by Rawls or Audi, but which maintains a principled distance from Quinn's radical inclusivism. (2) In section I, I analyze Quinn's argument for radical inclusivism and pose an initial objection to it. In section II, I turn to the question of how democratic legitimation is to be conceived. After outlining the `civic virtue' or `deliberative' interpretation of democratic institutions now proposed by a large group of writers, I argue that this approach implies a sphere of public reason wider than in Rawls's or Audi's conceptions, and yet not as all-inclusive as Quinn's. In particular, any cogent deliberative theory of democracy implies certain conditions of public accessibility for political argument which exclude religious bases for political positions if these are grounded purely on revelation. The deliberative or `civic virtue' conception thus gives us a basis for an intermediate position between Rawlsian public reason and radical inclusivism. This intermediate revelation-excluding (RE) model of deliberative democracy depends on certain epistemic presuppositions, which help distinguish democracy from theocracy.