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Rethinking Religious Reasons in Public Justification

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2013

ANDREW F. MARCH
ANDREW F. MARCH*
Affiliation:
Yale University
*
Andrew F. March is Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Yale University ([email protected]).
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Abstract

This article intervenes in the debate on the place of religious arguments in public reason. I advance the debate not by asking whether something called “religious reasons” ought to be invoked in the justification of coercive laws, but by creating a typology of (a) different kinds and forms of religious arguments and, more importantly, (b) different areas of political and social life which coercive laws regulate or about which human political communities deliberate. Religious arguments are of many different kinds, are offered to others in a variety of ways, and the spheres of life about which communities deliberate pose distinct moral questions. Turning back to the public reason debate, I argue then that political liberals ought to be concerned primarily about the invocation of a certain subset of religious reasons in a certain subset of areas of human activity, but also that inclusivist arguments on behalf of religious contributions to public deliberation fail to justify the use of religious arguments in all areas of public deliberation.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 107 , Issue 3 , August 2013 , pp. 523 - 539
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2013 

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