Rawls and a Shrinking Liberty of Conscience
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6398679 |
|---|---|
| Authors | A R Murphy (0000-0002-5569-6098, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1998 |
| Volume | 60 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 247-276 |
| Publication date | 1998-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Review of Politics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0034-6705 • E-ISSN: 1748-6858 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s003467050004119x |
| OpenAlex | W2077669689 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
| References cited | 33 |
John Rawls claims that his system of political liberalism represents the “completion and extension” of liberty of conscience, a grand solution to the problem of religious diversity that accompanied liberalism's emergence in the early modern world. I argue that such a claim cannot withstand historical scrutiny, that Rawlsian liberalism instead represents aretreatfrom the commitments that drove liberal tolerationists. Rawls's political liberalism forces individuals with non-mainstream comprehensive doctrines either to change the doctrine to fit Rawls's conditions of publicity; to manufacture a “public” justification for comprehensively derived political stances; to seek to change the parameters of public debate through, for example, civil disobedience; or to advance comprehensively derived views only so long as public reasons follow in due course. The first two of these solutions run counter to the historical development of liberty of conscience, and the third fails due to Rawls's pervasive emphasis on stability. The fourth misrepresents the nature of moral reasoning and comprehensive doctrines themselves. In conclusion, I argue that underlying Rawls's liberalism is a belief-action split that has historically suppressed religious liberty and, more troubling, a type of repression that undermines the very notion of comprehensive doctrines
Classical liberalism · Conscience · Democracy · Doctrine · Law and economics · Liberalism · Political science · Politics · Public reason · Scrutiny · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Religion and Society Interactions
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Islam and Democracy in Indonesia
Free Will, Religious Conflict, and the Social Contract
Politics by Other Means? Rawls, Feminists, Religious Conservatives, and Public Education
Compromising with the uncompromising
Religious language in the postsecular public sphere
Is American Democracy Safe for Catholicism
No proviso
The culture of disbelief
The naked public square
Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two Treatises of Government
Habits of the heart
The Encyclopedia of philosophy
The culture of narcissism
After Virtue
Liberalism and the Limits of Justice
A Letter Concerning Toleration
A History of Freedom of Thought
A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens
Liberalism and the Moral Life
Patterns of Moral Complexity
Morality, Politics and Law
Articles of Faith, Articles of Peace
'Bright enough for all our purposes'
Democracy in America
The Culture of Narcissism
The Cambridge Companion to Locke
Contingency, Irony, Solidarity
Toleration and the Constitution
The Works of Gerrard Winstanley
Political Liberalism and Political Education
Must Liberal Citizens Be Reasonable
Politically Incorrect
The Quakers' Efforts to Secure Civil and Religious Liberty, 1660-96
That Godless Court? Supreme Court Decisions on Church-State Relationships
| Unique citing works | 8 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,31 |
| Citation span | 2000 - 2023 (24) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 8 |