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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Question is what would that mean for the law in this area?
What if, as it were, we stripped away uh the religion.
Talk from the First Amendment of the US Constitution and said people are entitled to the free exercise of their conscience.
Okay?
And how would that work?
So there's two ways we could go here, right?
If we agree that religious conscience isn't special, that there's lots of claims of conscience that are just as morally important as claims of religious conscience.
We might think, well then, whenever the law conflicts with a matter of conscience, there ought to be some standards of circumstances when an exemption is given.
That's the standard response in the legal context.
There are some complications growing out of the nineteen ninety US Supreme Court case, but I think we can put the technical details to one side.
The bottom line is in the states and also at the federal level
There are circumstances where if you have a claim of religious conscience you can get an exemption from an otherwise generally applicable law.
Maybe we should just extend that to any claim of conscience.
Now, there are of course reasons to be nervous about that.
One reason to be nervous about that is that it will it will get the courts into the business of evaluating whether somebody's practices or beliefs really are matters of conscience.
And that's a bit tricky.
One of the things I think the courts like, and they've always been very careful to limit this to matters of religion, is that it's usually easier to figure out whether somebody's part of a religion and what that religion requires.
requires than it is to figure out whether they're acting genuinely on conscience.
Since after all, a person of conscience can be utterly solitary, right?
Think of Thoreau, right?
Showing 241–260 of 530 · page 13 of 27
← Previous
Next →