Michael Robinson takes issue with an ‘argument from voluntariness’ made by several opponents of current practices for managing conscientious objection (CO) in healthcare, including Cantor, Stahl and Emanuel, and Schuklenk, whom he characterises as ‘non-accommodationists’. Here I argue that while Robinson is right to oppose the argument from voluntariness, he misunderstands current arrangements for managing CO in healthcare, and he misses the force of the non-accommodationist case against those arrangements. I also argue that despite what he says, Robinson is as (...) much a proponent of reform of the management of CO in healthcare as are his non-accommodationist opponents. Additionally, I raise a concern about Robinson’s preferred approach to managing CO in healthcare. (shrink)

There is a strong need of a reasoned defense of what was known as the “independence” position of the science–religion relationship but that more recently has been denigrated as the “accommodationist” position, namely that while there are parts of religion—fundamentalist Christianity in particular—that clash with modern science, the essential parts of religion do not and could not clash with science. A case for this position is made on the grounds of the essentially metaphorical nature of science. Modern science functions because (...) of its root metaphor of the machine: the world is seen in mechanical terms. As Thomas Kuhn insisted, metaphors function in part by ruling some questions outside their domain. In the case of modern science, four questions go unasked and hence unanswered: Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the foundation of morality? What is mind and its relationship to matter? What is the meaning of it all? You can remain a nonreligious skeptic on these questions, but it is open for the Christian to offer his or her answers, so long as they are not scientific answers. Here then is a way that science and religion can coexist. (shrink)

In this second of two essays responding to critical discussion of my " Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason," I show how an ' accommodationist ' strategy can be used to defuse objections that were not exposed as irrelevant by the first essay. This strategy involves showing that the dominant concern of reasons for divine withdrawal can be met or accommodated within the framework of divine - human relationship envisaged by the hiddenness argument. I conclude that critical discussion leaves the argument (...) very much alive and kicking, and indeed strengthened as it moves into its second decade of life. (shrink)

This essay explores the possibility that religiously motivated intolerance and conflict can be reframed and positively utilized for constructive social-political purposes. After reviewing efforts by political philosophers over the past two decades to accommodate religious voices in political discourse, I scrutinize Charles Taylor’s attempt to improve upon the limits of “accommodationist” approaches to religious intolerance and conflict. I argue that both accommodationist and Taylor’s recognition-based approaches to religiously motivated conflict take the gravity of such conflict with insufficient seriousness. I then (...) explore the potential goods of intentional conflict by examining Chantal Mouffe’s account of agonistic pluralism as a proposal for thinking beyond tolerance as an orienting value for resolving intransigent conflict. While I argue that Mouffe’s account finally suffers from certain of the same misgivings as the accommodationist and recognition-based approaches, I conclude that agonistic pluralism’s aim to conceptually reframe (rather than eliminate) intolerance and conflict moves in an important and promising direction. (shrink)

This essay critically assesses two strategies of accommodation used by defenders of impartialism in ethics to argue that the care orientation represents no genuine challenge to impartialist theoretical paradigms. One strategy focuses on impartiality as a constraint on moral deliberation, the other as a constraint on moral justification. While highlighting respects in which the commitment to impartiality is more consonant with the care orientation than many advocates of care have acknowledged, this essay attempts to clarify crucial ways in which each (...) accommodationist strategy falls, thus locating some of the more important contributions and challenges the care orientation offers to moral theory. (shrink)

The pluralist liberal defends a conception of liberal politics grounded in the thesis of value pluralism. Since he argues from a particular metaphysical thesis – value pluralism – to a particular understanding of politics – liberalism – his account will feature two separable, but interrelated, components: a distinctive justification of liberalism, and a conception of politics with distinctive content. The particular flavor of liberalism to which the pluralist is led is a species of what I term “accommodationism” – an (...) understanding that sees as a polity’s central task the accommodation of many divergent conceptions of the good life. I argue that the pluralist liberal’s case is hampered by four difficulties. Two of these difficulties challenge the justification of liberalism in terms of value pluralism, and two of them plague the particular accommodationist understanding of liberalism to which the pluralist is led. I conclude by arguing that classical liberalism is a view that is immune to these latter two criticisms. In fact, I suggest a more general claim: that classical liberalism provides the most promising resources for the articulation and defense of a conception of politics dedicated to accommodating the diverse and heterogeneous versions of human flourishing countenanced by value pluralism. (shrink)

This paper critically appraises the applied action-guide approach to bioethics and finds it wanting in two ways: it is tethered to a social contract view of the doctor-patient relationship that is largely incompatible with experiences of illness and care; and, as a formalist doctrine, it lacks critical edge and tends toward accommodationism. An alternative approach is recommended that involves interpreting moral experience by means once associated with the rhetorical arts — practical reasoning, hermeneutics, casuistry, and thick description.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.2 (2002) 323-344 [Access article in PDF] Darwinism and Death: Devaluing Human Life in Germany 1859-1920 Richard Weikart The debate over the significance of Social Darwinism in Germany has special importance, because it serves as background to discussions of Hitler's ideology and of the roots of German imperialism and World War I. 1 There is no doubt that Hitler was a Social Darwinist, (...) viewing history as a struggle for existence among unequal races. All Hitler scholars agree on this point, and it is too obvious to deny when one reads Mein Kampf. 2 Whether Social Darwinism contributed to imperialism and militarism is less clear, though some have argued it did, at least as a justification for them. 3 Some Anglo-American writers during and immediately after World War I blamed Social Darwinism for inflaming German militarism. 4 [End Page 323]This discussion over both Social Darwinism in general and its German form in particular has reached something of an impasse lately. While some scholars insist that Darwinism contributed to or at least reinforced a competitive ethos in European political and social thought, others have stressed the varieties of Social Darwinism. 5 The latter remind us that, although some Darwinian social thinkers stressed competition, socialists were also avid Darwinists and saw it as support for their vision of a more cooperative socialist society. 6 Some scholars focus so much on the cooperative and peaceful thrust of Darwinian thinkers that one might think that Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid had carried the day in the late nineteenth century. For example, Paul Crook argues that Darwinism produced pacifist inclinations more than it did militarism. 7Another important debate in Darwin scholarship concerns the compatibility or incompatibility of Darwinism with other world views, especially traditional religion. The warfare thesis, which sees religion and science in perpetual conflict (often with science heroically winning the battle), has largely been abandoned by historians of science, who now see greater complexity in the interactions of science and religion. 8 Reacting against the warfare thesis, some have emphasized accommodation, showing how science and religion often work in harmony. As applied to Darwinism the accommodationist view stresses the receptivity of many Christians, including prominent evangelical pastors and [End Page 324] theologians, to evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century. 9 While the warfare thesis was clearly a crude caricature, an overemphasis on accommo-dationism can render the intensely emotional debates over Darwinism in the nineteenth century unintelligible and ignores the polemical uses of Darwinism by materialists and positivists in their fight against religion. 10This essay will attempt to make a contribution to both these debates by focusing on aspects of Darwinism that have been insufficiently explored to date—not the issues of competition vs. cooperation or capitalism vs. socialism or explicitly on religion, as is usual in the discussion over warfare or accommodation, but how Darwinism impacted thinking about the value of human life and the significance of human death. Indeed Darwinism, in harmony with the growth of materialism and positivism, helped alter many people's views on matters of life and death. Many prominent German Darwinists urged their society to reevaluate its stance on what today is known as biomedical ethics—infanticide, euthanasia, suicide, abortion, etc. By focusing on these issues, we will see that leading Darwinists invoked Darwinian science to undermine traditional Judeo-Christian ethical values; this went far beyond merely dismissing the Genesis creation story or even rejecting the supernatural.The scientists and physicians most important in embracing, developing, and popularizing Darwinism in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Germany vigorously argued that Darwinism did have important implications for religion, ethics, and social thought. Darwinism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced a significant shift in the world views of many who embraced it, and leading Darwinists insisted that their newly-found world view undermined traditional ways of thinking, including traditional ideas about religion and ethics. Ernst Haeckel, the most famous German Darwinist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, believed the most important aspect... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge, and Well-BeingDaniel H. FrankHava Tirosh-Samuelson. Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge, and Well-Being. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 596. Cloth, $50.00.Franz Rosenzweig tried hard to convince the neoKantian Hermann Cohen of the merits of Zionism and the normalization it would bring to Jews and Jewish life. His attempt met with this response from Cohen: "Oho! So the gang (...) now wants to be happy, does it?" For those ignorant of the history of Jewish philosophy, one might imagine that Jewish philosophers, no less than their non-philosophical kinsmen, were so weighed down by the burdens of history and persecution that happiness could play no role in their theorizing. But happiness plays a key role in the history of Jewish moral and political philosophy, especially in the premodern period. Even Spinoza, the last of the medievals and the first of the moderns, the great critic of the rabbinic tradition and of Maimonides in particular, is concerned in his Ethics with identifying those activities that together constitute human well-being and the good life. Only lately, since the Enlightenment and Kant, has non-eudaimonism been a live option for Jewish thinkers. Only with the rise of (modern) Orthodoxy, and its predilection for construing goodness as rectitude and rule-following, has eudaimonism fallen out of favor. But with Tirosh-Samuelson's weighty volume on happiness in premodern Judaism, there can be no excuse in the future to imagine that all Jews are, or must be, closet Kantians, strict deontologists. To think otherwise seems to come close to taking on the classical (anti-Semitic) dichotomy of legalistic Judaism vs. spiritual Christianity. In it own way, Happiness in Premodern Judaism is a critique of such a one-sided, monochromatic view of Judaism, whether from the Christian or even from the Jewish side.Tirosh-Samuelson writes explicitly as an intellectual historian, rather than as a philosopher. She understands herself and her project as one that presents just the facts, without evaluating them. While one may cavil at a lost opportunity, in the present case this would be churlish, given the enormous erudition on display. After an introductory chapter outlining the foundational moral theories of Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic philosophers, the text presents the (Greek-inspired) areteic wisdom literature of the Second Temple period, the teleological theocentrism of the rabbis, the Greco-Arabic Islamicate culture that nurtured Jewish philosophers from Saadia in the tenth century to Maimonides in the twelfth, the rabbinic and kabbalistic critiques of the philosophical ideal of happiness commencing [End Page 338] with the translation (into Hebrew) of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and finally, very important and the focus of much recent scholarly work, the transformation of Jewish eudaimonism through direct contact with Christian Scholasticism and later with the humanist Renaissance. All in all, a millennium and a half of Jewish intellectual history is presented in a sober and scholarly way.Not surprisingly Maimonides plays a pivotal role in the story that Tirosh-Samuelson relates. A Janus-like figure, he represents the culmination and height of accommodation with Greek and Greco-Arabic philosophical culture. However, with the gradual worsening of the socio-economic condition of European Jewry in the thirteenth century, his accommodationism seemed traitorous, and as a result generations of thinkers, mystics and philosophers alike, strove to critically distance themselves from Maimonidean Aristotelianism. Tirosh-Samuelson is admirably clear in pointing out that such anti-Maimonidean tendencies are ill-characterized as anti-philosophical. Hasdai Crescas in the late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries launched a massive critique of Maimonides' physics, metaphysics, and moral philosophy, but did so in as rigorous a manner as any philosopher would. The picture that enfolds over the course of the text is one of vigorous dialectic between partisans of 'alien' (Greek) wisdom and those who viewed such wisdom with considerable suspicion. Such a dialectic parallels, not surprisingly, developments in Christian philosophy.The trajectory of the story of premodern Jewish musings on happiness is from the centrality of reason and intellect, and the contemplative activity that is reason's preeminent actuality, to the primacy... (shrink)

In recent years, philosophers and psychologists have criticized character- or virtue-based normative theories on the basis that human behavior and cognition depend more on situation than on traits of character. This set of criticisms, which initially aimed at broadly Aristotelian virtue theories in ethics, has expanded to target a wide range of approaches in both ethics and, recently, epistemology. In this essay, I draw on the works of Maria Montessori to defend her conception of character and particularly of intellectual virtue (...) in the light of situationist objections. I start with an overview of the situationist challenge before turning to some reasons to think that Montessori’s virtue epistemology might be susceptible to it. I then offer a brief discussion of Montessori’s approach to character. After laying out two ways that Montessori, like recent conservative defenses of virtue epistemology, deflates the significance of situationist findings, I show some ways that Montessori’s virtue epistemology resembles so-called “accommodationist” responses to situationism. (shrink)

Recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions regarding the scope of the Establishment Clause have failed to provide a clear framework for determining what government actions are prohibited. Part of the problem concerns what kinds of actions constitute an establishment of religion. What criteria should determine the boundaries of an establishment challenge? Are governmental actions that may only indirectly affect religion (either positively or negatively) prohibited? This article aims to provide a coherent and normatively justified understanding of the Establishment Clause to help (...) answer these questions by considering not just the history of the Clause or the cases the Court has decided under it, but also considering overlaps from various philosophical justifications for the Clause—including justifications from rights theory, political liberalism, utilitarianism, and communitarianism. In the process, the article eliminates from consideration the Supreme Court’s so-called “accommodationist” approach and presents a new understanding of the neutrality test that anchors itself between strict separation and the current neutrality approaches. This it does by also taking into account what in moral theory is known as the doctrine of double effect and by showing how the doctrine further limits the various judicial views to just neutrality in the new sense I suggest, while also providing both clearer and firmer conditions. (shrink)

This book examines the relationship between race, religion, and economics within the black church. The book features unheard voices of individuals experiencing economic deprivation and the faith communities who serve as their refuge. Thus, this project examines the economic ethics of black churches in the rural South whose congregants and broader communities have long struggled amidst persistent poverty. Through a case study of communities in Alabama's Black Belt, this book argues that if the economic ethic of the Black Church remains (...) accommodationist, it will continue to become increasingly irrelevant to communities that experience persistent poverty. Despite its historic role in combatting racial oppression and social injustice, the Church has also perpetuated ideologies that uncritically justify unjust social structures. Wilson shows how the Church can shift the conversation and reality of poverty by moving from a legacy of accommodationism and toward a legacy of empoweri ng liberating economic ethics. (shrink)

The development of the theory of deliberative democracy has culminated in a synthesis between Rawlsian political liberalism and Habermasian critical theory. Taking the perspective of conceptions of freedom, this article argues that this synthesis is unfortunate and obscures some important differences between the two traditions. In particular, the idea of internal autonomy, which was an important, implicit idea in the ideology critique of the earlier Habermas, falls out of view. There is no room for this dimension of freedom in political (...) liberalism and it has largely disappeared from the later Habermas. In so far as others have followed Rawls and Habermas, deliberative democratic theory has converged around a less critical and more accommodationist view of freedom. If we want to keep deliberative democracy as a critical theory of contemporary society, we should resist this convergence. Our starting point should not be `the fact of reasonable pluralism' but rather `the fact of unreflective acquiescence'. This article argues for incorporating internal autonomy in a complex theory of freedom to which deliberative democracy should be normatively committed. (shrink)

In a lengthy article E. Scerri and J. Worrall put forward the case for a novel ‘accommodationist’ version of the events surrounding the development of Mendeleef's Periodic Table 1869–1899. However these authors lay undue stress on the fact that President of the Royal Society of London Spottiswoode made absolutely no mention of Mendeleef's famous predictions in the Davy Medal eulogy in 1883 and undue stress on the fact that Cleve's classic 1879 Scandium paper contained an acknowledgement of Mendeleef's prior prediction (...) of eka-boron.They also fail to analyse in any detail the so-called ‘rare earth problem’ which, in the opinion of this author, causes problems for their account but not for a predictivist account. (shrink)

The longstanding dominant view is that health care practitioners should be permitted to refrain from participating in medical interventions when they have a conscientious objection to doing so in a broad range of cases. In recent years, a growing minority have been fervently advocating a sea change. In their view, medical professionals should not be permitted to refuse to participate in medical interventions merely because doing so conflicts with their own moral or religious views. One of the most commonly offered (...) arguments in support of this position focuses on the fact that health care practitioners knew what they were getting into when they voluntarily chose to take on their professional roles; nobody forced them to do this. I will argue that, despite its popularity among opponents of conscientious refusal, this argument from voluntariness fails to provide us with a good reason to reject broad accommodationism in favour of non-accommodationism. No data are available. NA. (shrink)

There is a growing realization of the need to promote a constructive dialogue between science and religion both in the scientific and the religious community. Accommodationism based on the concept of nonoverlapping magisteria is arguably the dominant trend in the effort to achieve this goal. Yet despite the fact that accommodationism has many supporters, it has so far failed to promote a productive engagement between science and religion. The article argues that such engagement requires a critical re-examination of (...) the principal tenets, self-evident truths, and intuitions by both the scientific and the religious community. It further argues that despite isolated efforts seeking to promote such re-examination in both domains, neither the scientific nor the religious establishment shows much willingness to pursue this course. Rather they prefer to follow a conservative agenda and impose limits on reason that are designed to protect the status quo. (shrink)

This article argues that Habermas’s position on the relationship between religion and politics reaffirms his two-track political theory of the secular state and civic duty. His “hard-core” theory of secularism coupled with an ethics of citizenship seeks new ways of including religious citizens in modern pluralistic societies. The analysis of secularism both as a concept and as a guiding principle in Habermas’s work shows that most critics have misinterpreted his specific use of the term. The result of this is that (...) most secularist and accommodationist critics of Habermas’s ethics of citizenship disregard his two-track political theory and its co-originality principle that assumes the equal status of public and private autonomies of citizens. My aim is thus to shift critical attention to the central aspects of Habermas’s work on religion, specifically to the task of translating religious reasons into an all-accessible language. This task of translation faces several difficulties due to some points that are left unclear by Habermas, such as determining the line separating the informal and the formal spheres, and how to avert the risk of majoritarian hijacks of democracy that could altogether undermine the Habermasian framework. (shrink)

This paper examines the general neutrality principle of Rawls’ liberalism and then tests that principle against accommodationist intuitions and sympathies in cases concerning the non-neutral effects of a system of compulsory education on particular social groups.

The paper explores Pascal’s idea according to which the teachings of the Church assume the hiddenness of God, and, hence, there is nothing surprising in the fact of the occurrence of nonresistant nonbelief. In order to show it the paper invokes the doctrines of the Incarnation, the Church as the Body of Christ, and the Original Sin. The first one indicates that there could be greater than nonbelief obstacle in forming interpersonal bonds with God, namely the ontological chasm between him (...) and human persons. The assumption of the human nature by the Son of God could be seen as a cure for this problem. The doctrine of the Church shows it as an end in itself, and in order for the Church to have meaning and to exist there has to be nonbelief in the world. Finally, the dogma of the Original Sin shows that there is no category of purely nonresistant nonbelief. The paper also addresses Schellenberg’s “accommodationist strategy” from the perspective of the Christian theology and in the last part it investigates what should be the influence of the fact of the hiddenness on theology’s take on the divine revelation. (shrink)

The paper explores Pascal’s idea according to which the teachings of the Church assume the hiddenness of God, and, hence, there is nothing surprising in the fact of the occurrence of nonresistant nonbelief. In order to show it the paper invokes the doctrines of the Incarnation, the Church as the Body of Christ, and the Original Sin. The first one indicates that there could be greater than nonbelief obstacle in forming interpersonal bonds with God, namely the ontological chasm between him (...) and human persons. The assumption of the human nature by the Son of God could be seen as a cure for this problem. The doctrine of the Church shows it as an end in itself, and in order for the Church to have meaning and to exist there has to be nonbelief in the world. Finally, the dogma of the Original Sin shows that there is no category of purely nonresistant nonbelief. The paper also addresses Schellenberg’s “accommodationist strategy” from the perspective of the Christian theology and in the last part it investigates what should be the influence of the fact of the hiddenness on theology’s take on the divine revelation. (shrink)

In their work The Faces of Reason: An Essay on Philosophy and Culture in English Canada 1850-1 950, Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott consider that the Canadian way of doing philosophy uses reason in an accommodationist manner. I propose in this thesis that William Lyall's Intellect, the Emotions and the Moral Nature represents a splendid example of the accomodationist use of reason. The Maritimes philosopher advances the idea that emotions have a cognitive value, a claim which I support by trying (...) to put Lyall's ideas in a modern framework offered by French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. Latent in Lyall's work can also be found a theory of metaphor which I try to revive with the help of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. Thus, following Lyall, emotions and reason are always in a balance and they work together in order to give us a more consistent and fuller grasp of reality. (shrink)

Karl Barth's review of Franz Overbeck's posthumously edited volume, “Christentum und Kultur”, was part of a larger and ongoing episode of theological name-calling in the early 1920s, one that involved numerous other personal relationships, events, letter-correspondence, and intellectual resources. The full story remains untold, however, and assessments of Overbeck's influence on the Swiss theologian have been inconclusive. In this article, I contextualize Barth's review and argue that the primary impetus for his interaction was the identification of important counter-criticisms to the (...) charges and accusations he was receiving from various reviewers of the first Romans commentary, Adolf von Harnack in particular. Following an introduction to Overbeck's life and thought, I provide an exposition of Barth's review. This occasional work operated on multiple levels: as a summary, polemical, and constructive piece. While Overbeck generally corroborated Barth's emerging two-world eschatology, reinvigorated the time-eternity and God-man diastases, and encouraged his thinking about Urgeschichte, these themes were important secondarily as the basis for a more general attack against theological accommodationism and bourgeois religion. Whatever Barth finally understood or misunderstood about Overbeck's critical thought and interpretation of early Christianity, it was the attack itself by Overbeck and especially the criticisms he produced against shared “liberal” opponents that were the initial objects of Barth's curiosity. (shrink)

According to Steinberger, many, defending Hegel against Karl Popper and other critics, have reinterpreted Hegel as an "accommodationist," solving the apparent contradiction between individual and society by a modification of each polis--thus approximating something like liberalism. Steinberger maintains, however, that Hegel was more precisely a "perfectionist," following in a tradition which includes Rousseau and Marx, engaged in the enterprise of dissolving the discrepancy between the individual and society, and confident that in some way the "Rose" of reason might be found (...) in the "Cross" of the present. (shrink)

The fourth publication of the monograph series of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy, this lengthy letter of Leibniz on Chinese philosophy is an important contribution to East-West philosophical dialogue, for it depicts a sympathetic yet critical assessment of Chinese philosophy on the basis of translations and secondary sources available to Leibniz. Leibniz’s interest, as the translators point out, was not merely ecumenical, but an expression of high regard for the intrinsic contributions of Chinese thought. In spite of mistakes (...) in chronology, authorship, and interpretation of key notions of Chinese philosophy, Leibniz’s letter is important in the use of philosophical argumentation in the rebuttal of the historical and theological arguments given by Antonio Caballero a Santa Maria and Nicholas Longobardi who opposed the accommodationist position of Matteo Ricci. Leibniz’s letter cannot be regarded as a good guide to Chinese philosophy. But it has a place in the history of East-West philosophy in exemplifying the commendable attitude that combines serious appreciation and critical assessment. The translators have provided an excellent introductory guide to this Discourse. The explanatory notes and comments are quite helpful to the readers. An appendix on "Variant Readings of the Text" and a good bibliography are also provided.—A.S.C. (shrink)

J.L. Schellenberg’s Argument from Divine Hiddenness maintains that if a perfectly loving God exists, then there is no non-resistant non-belief. Given that such nonbelief exists, however, it follows that there is no perfectly loving God. To support the conditional claim, Schellenberg presents conceptual and analogical considerations, which we subject to critical scrutiny. We also evaluate Schellenberg’s claim that the belief that God exists is logically necessary for entering into a relationship with the Divine. Finally, we turn to possible variants of (...) Schellenberg’s case, and argue that the modifications necessary to accommodate our criticismas leave those variants with much less of a sting than originally suggested by his provocative formulation. (shrink)