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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Appearances
Surely a man of conscience, but not in virtue of being part of a community of established rituals and and so on.
So you might think as an epistemic matter, it would be an unreasonable burden to think that there should be general exemptions for
all claims of conscience.
In which case we could say, let's leave the First Amendment as it is, but not because there's a good moral argument for doing so, but because there's a good pragmatic slash epistemic argument for doing so.
Now, the other direction, of course, we could go in, since if we buy that line of argument, it really does entail a fundamental inequality between those whose claims of conscience are religiously based and those whose claims of conscience aren't.
They get a special status under law that those who do not have religious claims of conscience, yet genuine claims of conscience, lack.
The other possibility, of course, is to think that we should now.
Narrow the scope of exemptions quite radically.
Now, Nussbaum, of course, raises, I think, an important worry in her book about this route, because without a doubt, laws that get passed are unlikely to conflict with and impose excessive burdens on majority practices for pretty obvious reasons.
Even during prohibition, the police did not arrest Catholic priests.
During communion, though they were serving a bit of wine.
So the prohibition was, you know, when alcohol was illegal in the United States in the 1920s.
So if we went the route of eliminating exemptions from generally applicable laws for any claim of conscience, the burden would undoubtedly fall most upon those whose claims of conscience were in the minority in the society at large.
And this seems to me the hard question in this area is how to balance these two kinds of considerations.
On the one hand, not saying that claims of religious conscience get a higher status, a higher moral standing than other claims of conscience, but on the other side, not creating a regime in which only claims of conscience that are in the minority are going to feel the burden of finding themselves.
themselves in conflict with what the law requires of them, just because laws won't get passed that conflict with the majority's sense of what's morally obligatory, what they what they have to do.
And these are some of the issues I'm gonna hopefully grapple with, dare I say resolve?
Probably not in the book I'm writing on this subject.
Thank you, Matt and Mark.
Very good questions as always.
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