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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Now, after I started working on this project, I began reading Nussbaum's work on religious liberty, and of course have had the benefit since of discussing these issues with her.
She thinks that at the moral foundation of a principle of religious liberty and liberty of conscience, and in fact she doesn't disagree with me about the threshold issue.
She thinks the moral case is for liberty of conscience, not just liberty of religious conscience.
Yeah.
She thinks the right way to think of the moral foundation of the law of religious liberty is in terms of respect for conscience and not merely toleration.
Here she is aligning herself with an important tradition of moral thought.
Obviously, Kant is a predecessor here.
This same ideal of respect is embodied in the Universal Declaration for Human Rights.
I'm skeptical though that if we put pressure on this what notion of respect is at play, that we can really make out the case that religious conscience again warrants a special kind of respect that other matters of conscience don't.
And the difficulty is is there's an ambiguity in the notion of respect.
And I think to some extent this ambiguity is replicated in uh in Nussbaum's own discussion of it.
There's a famous distinction drawn by Steve Darwell many years ago between what he called recognition respect and appraisal respect, meant to capture two senses of respect that are often in play in ordinary life when we talk about respect.
So the idea of recognition respect, which would be at play when we say something like, you really ought to respect his feelings.
The idea of recognition
Recognition respect is that we have certain moral obligations to people in virtue of their being people.
The thing is, recognition respect is really silent on, it's odious on what those moral obligations are.
So one possibility is that we fully discharge our obligation of recognition and respect simply through toleration, if that's the only obligation morality imposes on us.
So it seems like we Nussbaum needs some thicker notion of respect here in order to show that there's really a difference between respect and toleration.
And Darwell's second sense of respect is what he calls appraisal respect.
And this is the sense of respect that comes out when we say things like, I really respect her intellect.
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