Christopher Eberle has developed a powerful critique of justificatory liberalism. According to Eberle, justificatory liberalism’s doctrine of restraint , which requires religious citizens to refrain from publicly advocating for policies that can be supported only by their religious reasons, is illiberal. In this article, I defend justificatory liberalism against Eberle’s critique.

In this article, I examine the relation of religious language and public debate within the context of postsecularism and defend a falsificationist model. I argue that the postsecular public sphere...

Habermas’ ‘ethics of citizenship’ raises a number of relevant concerns about the dangers of a secularistic exclusion of religious contributions to public deliberation, on the one hand, and the dangers of religious conflict and sectarianism in politics, on the other. Agreeing largely with these concerns, the paper identities four problems with Habermas’ approach, and attempts to overcome them: the full exclusion of religious reasons from parliamentary debate; the full inclusion of religious reasons in the informal public sphere; the philosophical distinction (...) between secular and religious reasons; and the sociological distinction between ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ religions. The result is a revised version of the ethics of citizenship, which I call moderate inclusivism. Most notably, moderate inclusivism implies a replacement of Habermas’ ‘institutional translation proviso’ with a more flexible ‘conversational translation proviso’. (shrink)

The paper discusses Rawls’ and Habermas’ theories of deliberative democracy, focusing on the question of religious reasons in political discourse. Whereas Rawls as well as Habermas defend a fully inclusivist position on the use of religious reasons in the ‘background culture’ or ‘informal public sphere’, we defend a moderately inclusivist position. Moderate inclusivism welcomes religiously inspired contributions to public debate, but it also makes normative demands on public argumentation beyond the ‘public forum’ or ‘formal public sphere’. In particular, moderate inclusivism (...) implies what we call a ‘conversational translation proviso’ according to which citizens have a duty to supplement religious with proper political arguments if – but only if – they are asked to do so by their co-discussants. This position, we argue, is more in line with the deeper intuitions behind Rawls’ political liberalism and Habermas’ deliberative model than is the fully inclusivist alternative. _Keywords_: conversational translation proviso, deliberative democracy, ethics of citizenship, Habermas, moderate inclusivism, public reason, Rawls. (shrink)

Public bioethics focuses on deliberating about, recommending, or establishing social policies or practices concerning health care and biotechnology. A brace of premises underlies much of the work of public bioethics. First, there is the view that, if one approaches reality and human life as if both were without ultimate significance, one will find that one shares a common public bioethics. That is, if one abstains not only from any religious concerns, but even from philosophical reflections on the circumstance that life (...) might have ultimate meaning, one will be able to articulate a common neutral moral perspective that all persons can share and that can be the basis of a common public bioethics. The second premise is that the controversies in bioethics arise from the presence of religious belief, especially Christian belief, which supports a set of moral commitments that generate controversies that make the framing of public policy difficult. The view is that there is significant disagreement among persons who hold religious positions, particularly Christians, and that in public bioethics we should strive to eliminate these controversies by relying on a neutral moral framework. This paper documents and challenges these premises. It demonstrates that Christian bioethics finds itself already embedded in the field of secular moral controversy before it adds the perspectives it brings. (shrink)

This article compares Habermas’s and Taylor’s approach to the role of religious language in a liberal democracy. It shows that the difference in their approach is not simply in their theories of religious language. The contrast lies deeper, in their incompatible moral theories: Habermas’s universal discourse ethics vs Taylor’s communitarian substantive ethics. I also explore William Rehg’s defence of discourse ethics by conceding that it is based on a metavalue of rational consensus. However, I argue that Habermas’s and Rehg’s discourse (...) ethics and translation proviso are untenable. While Taylor rightly argues that there is no reason to exclude religious reason from the formal political sphere, his proposed fusion of horizons to generate a new hybrid framework is also problematic. I suggest that Taylor’s historical hermeneutics should be extended to include the narrative approach to ethical deliberation as conducive to mutual experiential understanding, and hence to achieving a fusion of horizons of the diverse worlds of citizens in a liberal democracy. (shrink)

This article addresses the debate between Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor on the implications of state secularism for the public use of reason. Recent commentators have traced this debate either to Habermas’s and Taylor’s divergent views about the status of Western modernity or to their disagreement about the relation between the good and the right. I argue that these readings rest on misinterpretations of Habermas’s theory of social evolution and understanding of impartial justification. I show that the debate rests on (...) diverging interpretations of what it means for citizens to embed the principles of liberal democracy in their respective conceptions of the good. This difference in turn leads Habermas and Taylor to espouse different criteria of democratic legitimacy. I conclude by suggesting that we have prima facie reasons to prefer Habermas’s conception of legitimacy to Taylor’s, and to that extent, to favor his model of the public use of reason. (shrink)

As questões religiosas permeiam o conjunto da obra rawlsiana. O problema é saber como pessoas com diferentes doutrinas compreensivas religiosas podem chegar a um consenso sobreposto. A solução para o problema de como a legitimidade política pode ser alcançada, apesar do conflito religioso, e de como, entre cidadãos de diferentes crenças, a justificação política pode prosseguir sem referência à convicção religiosa é relacionada com a ideia de razão pública.

In this article, I argue that a common view of Habermas’s theory of public reason, which takes it to be similar to Rawls’s ‘proviso’, is mistaken. I explain why that mistake arises, and show that t...

Although Jürgen Habermas has a strong argument to link reason and philosophy, he also thinks that religion has a legitimate place in the (rational) public sphere. The question, though, is: what does this legitimate place entail? Is the power of religious language due to the fact that modern culture is not sufficiently secularized, that is, not yet sufficiently philosophic? Or is the power of religious language due to the fact that it successfully articulates certain widely shared moral (and substantive) intuitions? (...) In addressing these questions, this contribution has four parts. In the first section the issue of Critical Theory and religion will be briefly examined. The point here is that where religion (like aesthetics) plays a more central role amongst the thinkers of the first movement of Critical Theory (theorists such as Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Benjamin), this is not the case with Habermas (the leading exponent of the second movement). In the second section, this aspect is further explored by reconstructing Habermas’s intellectual project (with its religious implications) in six steps. Finally (in the third and fourth sections) some critical remarks (inter-paradigmatic and extra-paradigmatic) will be made on Habermas’s view of religion. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: This paper aims at providing a general assessment of Habermas’s recent positions on the place of religion in the public sphere. After reviewing and contrasting Rawls’s and Habermas’s respective positions on the issue, it argues that Habermas’s contribution raises some difficulties both theoretical and practical. At the theoretical level, it is shown that Habermas’s contribution poses a problem of coherence with respect to his more general conception of deliberative democracy. At the practical level, the soundness of Habermas’s view of (...) the respective roles expected of religious and secular citizens in the public sphere is brought into question. (shrink)

O artigo examina a idéia rawlsiana de razão pública, em primeiro lugar, e a defesa habermasiana do princípio da igualdade cívica, a seguir, afim de apresentar a noção de pós-secularismo de Habermas como resultado dos debates contemporâneos sobre a relação entre religião e política influenciados pela concepção de cidadania democrática de Rawls.The article examines the Rawlsian idea of public reason, fi rst, and the Habermasian defense of the principle of civic equality, then, in order to present Habermas’s notion of post-secularism (...) as a result of the contemporary debates on the relationship between religion and politics infl uenced by Rawls’s conception of democratic citizenship. (shrink)