Religious Reasons and Public Healthcare Deliberations

Abstract

This paper critically explores the path of some of the controversies over public reason and religion through four distinct steps. The first part of this article considers the engagement of John Finnis and Robert P. George with John Rawls over the nature of public reason. The second part moves to the question of religion by looking at the engagement of Nicholas Wolterstorff with Rawls, Robert Audi, and others. Here the question turns specifically to religious reasons, and their permissible use by citizens in public debate and discourse. The third part engages Jürgen Habermas's argument that while citizens must be free to make religious arguments, still, there is an obligation of translation, and a motivational constraint on lawmakers. The final section argues that even though Habermas's proposal fails, nevertheless he recognizes a key difficulty for religious citizens in contemporary liberal polities. Restoration of a full role for religiously grounded justificatory reasons in public debate is one part of an adequate solution to this problem, but a second plank must be added to the solution: recognition that religious reasons can enter into public deliberation not just as first-order justifications of particular policies, but as second-order reasons, to be considered by any polity that respects its religious citizens and, more broadly, the good of religion.

Keywords:

• John Finnis
• John Rawls
• Jürgen Habermas
• Nicholas Wolterstorff
• public debate
• public reason
• Robert George

Notes

1. George comes to a similar conclusion: “How can this denial [that a view is reasonable] be sustained independently of some engagement with the specific arguments they advance—arguments that Rawls' idea of public reason is meant to exclude without an appeal to their soundness and reasonableness or the truth or falsity of the principles and propositions in support of which they are offered?” (2006, p. 23).

2. In Political Liberalism, Rawls writes in regard to abortion that “any comprehensive doctrine that leads to a balance of political values excluding [the] duly qualified right in the first trimester is to that extent unreasonable” (1996, p. 243, note 32).

3. That epistemology is articulated and defended in Nicholas Wolterstroff, John Locke and the Ethics of Belief (1996).

4. An argument of his sort is put forth in Boyle, “Limiting Access to Health Care: A Traditional Roman Catholic Analysis” (2002).

5. The movement of Habermas' thought on this matter is well traced by Maeve Cook, “Salvaging and Secularizing the Semantic Contents of Religion: The Limitations of Habermas's Postmetaphysical Proposal” (2006).

6. Cook makes a similar point (2006, p. 196).

7. I have benefited from various conversations with Joseph Boyle on these matters.