Brian Leiter
speaker
530 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2009
last heard Sep 2010
Brian Leiter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Thanks very much for having me again.
I'm looking forward to it.
Right.
So the the paper which appeared in a journal called Constitutional Commentary in two thousand eight, called Why Tolerate Religion, was titled to provoke, but its answer was much more mundane in many ways.
The the question I was actually interested in uh was whether there was any reason to tolerate matters of religious conscience as distinct from other kinds of matters of conscience.
So the ultimate answer to the question is yes, of course, there's lots of reasons to tolerate religion, but there aren't any religion-specific reasons for doing that.
The reasons for thinking that the law should provide special protections for liberty of conscience are good and compelling reasons.
What struck me is that if you look at, say, all the Western constitutions, they all single out religious
conscience for a special kind of protection.
The Canadian Charter mentions liberty of conscience.
Some of the uh the European ones mention liberty of conscience, but all the litigation, all the decisions is about claims of religious conscience.
And we know what the historical reason for that is, right?
That is we know about the catastrophes that grew out of religious conflict in Europe that led people to think it was really important.
To bring these kinds of conflicts to an end.
I wanted to ask sort of a moral philosopher's political philosopher's question about this.
That is, if we were starting de novo, right, drafting a new constitution, would we want to follow the lead of all these constitutions in terms of saying religious conscience is special in a way that other matters of moral conscience aren't special?
And the conclusion of the paper is no, there is nothing special about matters.
Of religious conscience that should lead us to think that the law should provide a special kind of protection for that those forms of conscience as against any other.
I think to answer the the question that that I try to pose here, we do have to say something about what's distinctive of religious conscience, matters of religious conscience, to figure out whether the best moral arguments for toleration of conscience or the best moral arguments for liberty of conscience would be especially concerned with matters of religious conscience.
So one part of my project is to go down the road that philosophy
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